


Past One O'clock

by waterwings



Series: The Texting Verse [2]
Category: Carry On Series - Rainbow Rowell, Simon Snow & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Magical Theory, Post-Book 2: Wayward Son, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rock bottom and the mess we find down there, Simon's Wings, Texting, Tuesdays, Which are the absolute worst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 04:07:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 40,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29430021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waterwings/pseuds/waterwings
Summary: Sometimes, Baz can forget that Simon broke up with him on a Tuesday. (Fuck Tuesdays, by the way.)Sometimes, Simon can forget that Baz is doing well—really well—and seems almost happy. (Fuck happiness too, actually.)But neither of them can forget a drunken text, three years later, at 1:02 am.Nothing really counts past one o’clock in the morning. So, a little texting can’t hurt, can it? (Spoiler: it can hurt. It does hurt. Quite a lot.)This is a fic about rock bottom and the mess that we find down there; but it’s also a story about redemption, healing, and broken wings that still manage to fly.
Relationships: Dev/Niall (Simon Snow), Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Pitch/Simon Snow
Series: The Texting Verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2162103
Comments: 193
Kudos: 156
Collections: Snowbaz Sweethearts Fic Exchange 2021





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [annabellelux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/annabellelux/gifts).



> This is a gift from one lover of angst to another. Once, Annabellelux told me that she loved a good texting fic and then she told me she liked my fic, Was It Me. And of course, I dissolved into a pile of melt.  
> This fic is meant to be Was It Me re-imagined. It is the darkest timeline, what the fic would’ve been had I read Wayward Son before I wrote the original. Annabellelux, you are stunning and my perfect Valentine. You angst loving, sharp as Baz’s jawline, warm as Simon’s wing hugs, exquisite example of a human. 
> 
> Good god, I got so much help with this fic! Thank you [arcanine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcanine/pseuds/arcanine), to whom I pour out all of my insecurities and who will always see things in their first, worst form, I adore you. Endlessly. And bottomless thanks to [Gampyre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gampyre/pseuds/Gampyre) and [BazzyBelle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BazzyBelle/pseuds/BazzyBelle) and [xivz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xivz/pseuds/xivz) and [Caitybug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caitybug/pseuds/Caitybug). You're all just so marvelous.

**Simon**

July, 2016

Baz is sitting at the end of the bed. His perfect posture has melted into something sleepier, his sleeves are rolled up and his forearms will be the death of me. I want to push him into the sheets, cover him up with all of my inches. I want to reach out and touch. I want—

I can’t.

“My mother used to say that the world becomes a strange place past one o’clock,” Baz says, and it’s almost a whisper. He’s talking to the floor, those glorious forearms pressed into his thighs.

“I don’t get it,” I say, drinking him, gulping and drowning in this beautiful man. My wings are a canopy of red, billowing around us, moonlight filtering through chorded muscle. Sitting like this, with all of my monster parts on display, would normally turn my stomach. I’ll never be good enough and that usually drives me a little mad, but right now…I’m too tired and he’s too lovely and I just don’t care.

Baz sighs and it’s forever on the exhale. I could live in the corners of his lips—especially when they’re turned up just like that. Soft happiness looks good on Baz.

“She loved little traditions that were uniquely hers. We didn’t do resolutions on New Year’s. Instead, we wrote down our fears and set them on fire.” Baz pauses, as if he’s savouring the memory. 

For a moment, I long for the mother I could have had, for the little traditions that could have been if someone had ever wanted me. It aches, somehow. Absence shouldn’t be able to hurt like this.

“My mother made her own holidays. Had her own personal rules for the universe,” Baz whispers. There’s nothing quite so lovely as when Baz talks about his mum. I keep my mouth shut, desperate not to startle the moment away. Keep talking, Baz. Please. Give me another piece of you. Those pieces you don’t give to anyone else.

“She said…” his words trail off into the painful nostalgia of love lost. I want to touch him so badly.

“What did she say?”

“That past one o’clock, the world is a different place. That…fuck, Simon, it's stupid.”

“It’s not.”

Baz breathes in, chasing the memory. “Past one o’clock, the hours…they become magical. It’s _magic hour_ , she said.”

I mouth the words. _Magic hour._

“The normal rules no longer apply, when it’s so late that its early.” Baz chuckles. It’s a soft sound, ice knocking about in a glass, and it’s beautiful. _He’s beautiful._

“I tried so hard to stay up. And when I managed it, would convince her to give me ice cream or coffee. Or to take me for a drive and let me sing with the windows down. These were the exceptionalities I chased.”

“The past one o’clock exception,” I say, and I can’t help the way I smile at him. _He knows. He’s gotta know that I love—_

“Indeed.”

I glance over at the neat little alarm clock on Baz’s bedside table. 1:02 am. “So, normal rules don’t apply, then?”

“Look at you, grasping a concept on the first try.”

I ignore the words—there’s no bite to them anymore—and throw myself at him, his forearms mostly.

“Snow. What—”

“Does this mean I can tickle your—”

“What! No!” The bastard wriggles free, and now his hair is mussed and his eyes are bright and I want—

“Control yourself, Snow.”

“Sorry.” Except that I’m not.

“She used to sit on the end of my bed, when I couldn’t sleep, and explain that these hours were special. Filled with exceptions and oddities. Said that you might encounter something…not human.” Baz chuckles bitterly. “I don’t think she anticipated quite how apt those words would turn out to be.”

“You’re human.”

“Am I?” The words are so soft.

“You’re alive.”

“I’m monstrous.”

“No,” I say. “You’re mine.”

His thin hand reaches up to touch me, the ugly parts of me. His fingers are cold against the heat humming in the red muscle of my wings. His thumb traces the fibrous edge and I shudder. “We can be monstrous together, I suppose,” he says and oh god, he must know. _I love you. I love you. I love you._

August, 2017

_Baz, Draft, unsent: I love you. I love you. I love you._

_Baz: Simon, please. Don’t do this. Come back._

**Simon, Draft, unsent: your the only good thing. Your too good for me. Just cause I love you doesn’t mean I have the right to stay. to just sink and drag until your down here with me. Fuck. I love you. I love you iloveyouiloveyou. I shouldve told you. But its not enough**

**Simon: No**

October, 2020

**Simon**

The world smells like sweat and beer. The dance floor is slippery with it.

Someone’s touching me. Palms and fingers tracing my shoulders, something solid pressing against my back. The shudder crashing over my flesh is half disgust, half pleasure. People touching me still sends waves of nausea rippling under my skin, but, in a way, that’s a part of this. Veins made of snakes and sex.

_You’re a fucking masochist, Simon Snow._

It’s just a voice in my head. Just Baz’s voice in my head. Just me, pretending that he’s here and clinging to something I can’t have but want want want.

I lean into the nobody behind me and close my eyes, letting my fingers flit up a sweaty neck and into his hair. It’s soft enough. It could be—

_You like that, don’t you?_

I do.

I really really do.

When I can pretend that it’s him—those long fingers slipping under my shirt, his lips dipping down to my neck to taste me.

_I’d do that and more, Chosen One._

I wish I’d found the nerve to dance with Baz like this—with something more intense than shuffling feet and self pity. I wish I’d let him touch me like this.

I’d never been much good at dancing. The first time I stumbled into a club, red rimmed eyes looking for something, anything to stop all of the fucking thoughts tripping over each other inside my skull, I didn’t know what to do.

The memory of that night makes my lips twitch. I can still remember how the bar stool had felt, squishy and torn. I sat there a long time, staring out into a sea of bodies dancing and touching and looking totally unbothered. I’d wanted that. I’d wanted it so badly.

“What’re you doing, all alone?” someone had said, slipping in beside me. Their sleeves had been rolled up and I remember their forearms. They’d had nice forearms.

_Not as nice as mine._

Not as nice as Baz’s, but still.

“Why do you look so miserable?”

I’d gulped, unsure of how to answer that. “I-uh-“ I left the only good thing in my life behind and I’m too much of a fucking coward to try to fix it?

“Rough day?” forearms had asked.

“Rough life,” I’d mumbled, consumed by self pity.

Forearms was unfazed. “I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do,” he’d said.

I’d wanted to run so badly, then. I still do.

“I’m going to buy you a shot and then we’re going to dance.”

“I can’t—”

“You _can_ dance. Everyone can. Plus,” he’d said, sliding a tiny glass of something clear over to me, looking more than a little cheeky, “that’s what this is for.”

That first night feels a million miles away. I throw my head back and laugh into the swell of the music. I can do this. I can slip into a messy haze and just forget. Beat those fucking thoughts off with the blunt object of exertion and alcohol.

Hands are moving, my ears are ringing, and the alcohol in my blood is setting the world on tilt. If I keep my eyes closed, maybe I can pretend—

My back pocket vibrates. It’s my phone. It’s just my phone. I fumble between the tangle of hands and hips, beer and sweat.

Penny (11:43 pm): when are you coming home?

Memories of a familiar fight, a battleground well-trodden. “ _You can’t just disappear on me, Simon_.” Giant brown irises coated in some unholy mix of disappointment, concern, and guilt. If I let it in, I could drown in guilt—could choke on an ocean of regret and shame and just drift away.

I should really start leaving notes. Pen has a bunch of sticky ones on top of the fridge, next to a stack of gel pens—she’s never been very subtle.

I catch a glimpse of the stranger crowding into my personal space. Dark hair—too brown to be Baz, but long like his was. He’s tall too. His eyes are all over me and I _know_ that look.

He’s close enough that maybe, just maybe, I can disappear into a fantasy. Where I can pretend that his eyes are stormy and his nose is a little crooked and his name is Baz.

_As if you could find someone to replace me._

Inner Baz has no idea how right he is.

I try anyway. Let the noise and the dim lights and the messy bodies swell, and I let the current drag me under. I flail around down here, desperate for a grey-eyed vampire to rescue me, knowing full well that he’s not coming. And that it’s my fault.

The mess I’ve made of myself peaks as I mash my flat’s keys in the general direction of the front door.

_You’re a disaster, Snow._

I really am.

Everything had been fine until brown-haired-not-Baz tried to strangle me with his tongue in the bathroom. Christ, even that would’ve been fine, if he hadn’t tried to touch my…hadn’t run his fingers up the back of my shirt and over the ragged edges hiding beneath the cheap fabric.

I tried to drown the memory with another drink. And then another. As the door finally (finally!) tumbles inward and I tip inside, I realize how terrible an idea that had been.

My shoes feel like they’ve been glued to my feet and the living room is doing a mad dash across my vision. Just gotta make it to my bed. And set an alarm. Because I have work tomorrow. At eight in the fucking morning.

I’m two left feet, blindfolded, with the coordination of a slinky, but somehow, I make it to my room. (There’s no way Penny slept through that entrance.) (I’m going to have to talk about this tomorrow.) (Fucking hell.)

Teeth can wait. Pyjamas are a dream for someone more hydrated. I just need—

I flop onto old springs and the air in my duvet wooshes past my cheeks. Bed. Holy grail of safety and the entrance into dream land.

There’s no way that the thoughts can find me now. I’m too tired and the world is too spinny and and and—

Of course, Baz is tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.

Florescent green numbering screams the time from across the room: 12:59 am. Nearly one. Christ, I’m going to be knackered tomorrow.

_It’s nearly one o’clock, Snow. Do you remember?_

I do.

The memory slithers through the cracks of my carefully constructed walls of don’t-think-about-him. The way his hair had fallen across his cheeks, the corners of his mouth that I would pray to, and the way his words had sounded—so soft.

_A time when normal rules no longer apply._

Maybe…

I’ve never tried to message Baz. Not since that horrible day. Fucking Tuesdays, the most garbage of all the days.

I look up.

1:01 am.

_The past one o’clock exception._

It’s been years. Fucking plural. I shouldn’t make this kind of decision when my room is wiggling like a trick house.

But the pull in my gut is strong, nearly as strong as when the crucible had held our intestines in its hands and refused to let go. Every cell aches with missing.

_Is tonight the night you remember your courage, Chosen One?_

I reach back, unthinking, for the wing that isn’t there. Chase the memory of his thumb against warm cartilage. And then I reach for my phone.

Fuck it.

**Simon (1:02 am): uhhhhh, hey?**

I pass out before I can think any more about what I’ve done.

**Baz**

I hate Tuesdays. Tuesday manages to be both dreadful (in that they are filled with dread) and forgettable all at once. Tuesdays are the cousin you never liked but always had to entertain. They are the last bit of food on an almost empty plate that you do not want but feel obligated to consume.

Simon Snow broke up with me on a Tuesday.

A breakup is pedestrian. Young romance and first love lacks endurance, is not made to run the marathon of a life.

As endings go, it was predictable.

One would think that to see a thing coming would soften the impact. When that greedy little ending punched holes through blood and flesh and bone. I knew it was coming. It was written all over the man whose face I’d made my life’s work.

And so, of course it is a fucking Tuesday when my phone goes off at 1:02 am, splitting my room in half with the shrill of it’s text alert.

Oh no no no.

This particular text alert has special meaning—one of Dev’s few productive suggestions from what he called the “Dark Days” after Snow left me.

In the days and weeks following that catastrophic fucking Tuesday, my dignity and personal hygiene took a significant turn for the worse. The will to do much more than curl into the smallest version of myself and hide in the centre of my bed disappeared. I was surrounded by softcover romance novels, takeout containers, and tissues—and I didn’t care.

Dev found me three weeks after the event, sleepless, manic, and in one of Snow’s old t-shirts.

“What the—”

“Get out!” I said, practically hissing.

“Baz…” Dev had approached me with the caution one would approach a feral kitten.

“I don’t want you. I don’t need you!” Dev insists that I seized a soup ladle and brandished it at him like a musketeer. I still dispute this point.

“Baz?” He’d crept closer and closer, until he finally wrapped me in something like a hug.

“He doesn’t want me. He doesn’t need me.”

Dev, to his credit, hadn’t said a word. Just held me up, soup ladle limp in one hand, tear-stained shirt weeks without a wash, until I calmed down enough to spit the entire story out.

“Baz,” he’d said, all seriousness and certainty. “You deserve better than all of that. You…” He’d taken a deep breath. “You deserve more than what he’s got left after he’s fallen apart. More than what’s left when he’s done.”

And I’d wondered when my cousin had gotten so wise.

It was Dev who’d suggested the text tone.

“I keep checking my fucking phone. Just...waiting,” I’d croaked. “Every time it hums or buzzes or looks at me the wrong way, I…I think…I want it to be…”

“I’ve got my phone programmed so that, when Niall texts me, it makes a—”

“Kissy sound?”

“A fart noise, actually.”

“I’ll never understand your relationship.”

As it turns out, some people just fall happily in love. No prophesized battles or break ups in the arrivals terminal to speak of.

“So, we need to make Snow’s texts sound as obnoxious as possible. Obviously. What’s the most annoying sound in the world?”

And that is how I know it’s him.

Because the sound of a peacock screaming to the high heavens is echoing through my room.

“Peacocks are fowl creatures, with an overzealous sense of importance and gigantic egos,” I’d insisted, while Dev tried to find downloadable audio file. “They’re insufferable. And their mating cries are—”

“KYAH!”

“The worst sound in the world,” Dev said, laughing, and ensuring that, if Snow ever decided to barge back into my life, I would, at least, have fair warning.

And so I know.

I know.

After three years of radio silence, of nothing more than his final, resounding **no** , Simon Snow has reached across the years the ache of missing him. My stomach has fallen out. I don’t think I’ve taken a breath since my phone went off.

It’s across the room.

On my night table.

I could just leave it until morning. Make the imbecile who left me wait, wait until I’m good and ready to answer him and not a moment sooner, so help me Cersei.

I force my eyes to focus, drag them out of the watery grave of distraction, force the words on the page to arrange themselves properly, thank you very much.

_“The properties a mage’s magickal core factor heavily into the ability of a physician to heal any serious spell damage…”_

I manage to force one line in through my retinas before my mind revolts. Simon Snow has texted me, Simon texted me, Simon sent me a message and I wonder what it is and what on earth could the idiot possibly have to say.

It could be an apology. _It had better be an apology_. It could be a dozen lines of chaotic bluster about how he was insensitive and cold, how he left even after I begged him to just give me a moment. Just one more moment.

I could have told him.

I _should_ have told him.

_“The importance of understanding the magickal essence of the is absolute essential and can be brought more easily to the surface by the spell **Listen to your heart** …”_

Maybe that’s the content of the message. A declaration of love. Something properly romantic to make up for years of loss.

Something strangled and painful crawls out of my throat—a hybrid between a cry and a scream. I slam my book closed and stalk across the room.

“I will not have you intruding on my evening, you cretin,” I seethe at no one. “You think you can just barge in here, and take over my perfectly lovely Monday night. You rude, imposing, thoughtless, ridiculous fuck.”

I snatch my mobile off the nightstand, tearing it from it’s charging cord. My fingers are shaking and I’m so agitated, I can’t tell if it’s nerves or anticipation.

“Okay, you moron, what the fuck do you have to say?”

I open the message and stare down at it for a long time.

**Simon (1:02 am): uhhhhh, hey?**

Hey.

Hey!

FUCKING HEY!

This will not stand. This is unacceptable. This is…

“This is so fucking _you_ Simon Snow!” I scream it, hear my voice echo around the empty flat.

My fingers are flashing, lightening digits, composing a thousand insults and feelings in blue light.

_Draft, unsent, Baz (1:08 am): Who the fuck do you think you are, you insensitive fucking troll? Did you think you could just waltz back into my life with a fucking “hey”? Did you really think that would work? Of course you did! You’re the Chosen One, who can shape the story to their will and make happily ever after just because you finally decided to want it. To want me. How could you? How could you._

_Draft, unsent, Baz (1:09 am): What on earth are you doing, texting me? Why would I ever want anything to do with someone who walked away from me and didn’t look back?_

_Draft, unsent, Baz (1:10 am): You left me. You fucking left me. You left me and now all you have to offer, all you have to say is “hey.” That’s not good enough, Simon. I deserve more than your drunk texts._

Fuck.

I stare down at the time on my mobile.

1:11 am.

And then I see Simon’s message for exactly what it is. A mistake. Something sent after a night out and one too many drinks and, Crowley, the knowledge and certainty that I’m right hits me like a freight train crashing through my chest.

We haven’t spoken in years, but I stalk his social media with more vigour than he stalked me in fifth year. I see his stories, his photos, his life in miniature through the rectangle of my mobile. I watched him from a distance, drunken smiles and awkward birthdays. I saw him stumble over the graduation stage (social worker, and doesn’t that make so much sense? I wish I’d known him well enough to suggest it) and start his first job. Milestone after milestone. Without me. Every image of those simple blue eyes tweezed at the chambers of my heart, but I watched anyway.

Watched through a screen as the man I loved lived his life.

I’m a hopeless flaneur in a digital landscape and that means that I know Snow was probably out with a thousand friends having a wonderful time and has now stumbled home after a few too many. 

Which means that this message…

…means nothing.

A mistake.

A drunken misstep.

One I’m, frankly, not sure how to handle.

A part of me, three years younger and desperately in love, would’ve taken this. Whatever Simon could give was enough. The temptation to cling to the shreds of what we had is painful.

To grab at the coattails of my dreams.

It took me a long time to realize that grasping for a man who didn’t know how to give wasn’t good for me, that I needed more than what he left behind.

Steeling myself with the scraps of my confidence, I start to type.

_Baz (1:16 am): While the knowledge that you are alive is not unwelcome, drunk texts in the middle of the night do not become you. Please do not contact me again._

The sound of the text leaving my device feels like a thousand storybooks slamming shut. As I stare down at the message, the letters start to swim. _I will not cry for you, Simon Snow. I’ve done quite enough of that already._

I make it until I’m under the covers before I give in. Seize my phone and connect to my voicemail.

**_Please enter your password._ **

I mash the keys.

**_You have no new voice messages and one saved message. To play your messages, press one._ **

One.

Always one.

**_First saved message._ **

_“Baz you sneaky fuck. You were gone when I woke up. I wanted...”_

There’s a pause on the phone, and I hear Simon’s voice crack with the indecision of whether he was going to share _._

_“Well never mind. Thanks for doing the dishes on your way out. Thanks for telling me that story about your mum. It was really lovely. I’m always gonna think that the hours past one o’clock are special somehow. And I love…that.”_

There’s a long silence coming. I know it well.

_“Listen, Baz. I just…I know that I’m…a mess. I’m sorry about that. So sorry. But I just…I want you to know that—”_

This part always makes me catch my breath. Even though I know what’s coming.

_“—Pen! What! Curry’s fine! Fuck, sorry. We’re gonna order takeaway after class. I’ll see you tonight, yeah? Kay bye.”_

I clutch my phone to my chest and pretend that I’m fine, that it’s all fine, that everything is fine. It’s been months since I listened to that message. I used to listen to it every night, to let the sound of his voice—his voice when it’s mostly happy and not soaking in sadness—wash over me and carry me off to sleep. It’s no problem really. I haven’t listened to this in months.

I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and Simon Snow will step into the background, fade into a thousand faceless memories and my personal brand of rigid emotional compartmentalization.

It will be fine. Truly.

But tonight…

**To save this message, press one, to delete, press two, to replay, press…**

I press three and let the happy tones carry me away.

**Simon**

The sun pierces my skull and stabs mercilessly at my brain matter. “Fuuuuuuck,” I groan, realizing that I’ve got sand in my mouth. That’s the only explanation for the gross taste all over my tongue.

Memories have started to crawl behind my eyes, which I’ve determinedly slammed shut. Fuck sunshine. Fuck it straight to—

_Dignified, chosen one. You really look the part._

“Fuck off, Baz,” I groan at the internal monologue I know is just some twisted reflection of my subconscious but fuck it and fuck him and—

_Your mastery of the English language, the breadth of your vocabulary, it is truly astounding._

There’d been gin. Too much gin. And a dark-haired bloke. We’d gone to the toilet, which is fine if that’s all it is. Something quick and hot and mutually beneficial, really. But he’d tried to touch my back— “Ugh,” I moan, attempting to sit up. And I’d freaked out, hadn’t I? Because, no matter how dark his hair was, he wasn’t—

_He wasn’t me._

I ignore inner Baz this time. I usually do when he’s right.

There’d been a whole scene when I’d thrown tall-brown-haired-bloke off me. Then rushed out into the cold. Called an uber. Maybe vomited on the sidewalk? (It would explain the taste in my mouth).

Collapsed and then…

“Fuck.”

_Indeed._

“Fuck fuck fuck.”

_Truly astounding, that vocabulary._

“I didn’t.”

_I’m afraid so._

All of a sudden, it’s like I’m a king crab, with several unruly legs and an ecosystem that’s 80% alcohol, and I’m scuttling all over the bed in a desperate attempt to find my phone, to see the damage, to…

The screen lights up (battery life, 13%) and I blink down at the carnage of the previous evening.

“What the fuck was I thinking?”

_It appears you were not._

**Simon (1:02 am): uhhhhh, hey?**

“Hey!” What the actual fuck was I thinking?

I’m so mortified, the thoughts are escaping my body in little yelps. “It’s been three fucking years and all I can manage is HEY!” I don’t know who I’m yelling at. Myself probably.

“Simon?” Penny’s voice wafts into my room from somewhere out in the flat.

Penny’s ability to sniff out bullshit is un-fucking-paralleled. I need to get myself under control, and fast, or I need to tell her—

“What’re you squawking about?” she says, pushing my bedroom door wide open, and I can’t help but smile (it hurts to smile). For as long as she’ll have me, Penny will be family. 

“I…well…”

Her eyes, puffy with sleep and rubbed a bit raw, narrow in on my face. “What did you do?”

“I…” suddenly find myself unable to speak? Because there’s a message beneath my own idiotic attempt at an olive branch. “Oh, fuck.” My hands are shaking.

“What!” Penny half shouts, shuffling across the room, her woolly socks slipping on the hardwood. “What is it?”

“He messaged back.”

“Who did?”

“Um…”

“Oh Simon. No.”

“What—”

“I know that face. I know that look. It’s your I’m-obsessed-with-Baz look.”

“Is not.”

“What did you do?”

“I don’t have an obsessed with B-Baz face,” I mumble.

“What. Did. You. Do?” Penny’s voice is all punchy consonants and seriousness.

“Uh,” I say, trying to close my eyes against this awful fucking morning. “I think I texted him last night.”

“You drunk texted Baz?”

“Um—”

“You!” She interrupts, jabbing me with her pointer finger. “Drunk texted the most important—” another jab, “fucking—” jab, “person in your whole goddamn life?”

“Uh—”

“Why would you do that, Simon? Did you really think it would work?”

“I guess we could…” I gulp, “check?”

“Seven snakes, that’s right! He replied.” She sounds as mortifieid as I feel. “Give it here!”

“No! It’s my drunk text!” I sound so petulant and mewling, under normal circumstances, I would want to set myself of fire. But there are more pressing concerns right now. Namely, Penny’s grabby hands. 

“Simon, lemme see!”

The argument involves flailing limbs (Penny) and throbbing skulls (me), but eventually, we’re both seated with the phone between us, looking down at the first words I’ve heard from Baz in three years.

_Baz (1:16 am): While the knowledge that you are alive is not unwelcome, drunk texts in the middle of the night do not become you. Please do not contact me again._

If my mouth weren’t filled with sand, I’d be able to taste the silence.

Eventually, “Well, he’s happy to know that you’re alive?” Penny says weakly.

“Fuck.” I don’t know what I was expecting. Him to leap through the phone and forgive me for everything and be my happy boyfriend?

Maybe that was what I was expecting. What the fuck is wrong with me?

_Oh Snow, so many things._

“Yeah, that pretty much sums it up,” Penny says, slapping me on the back and dislodging the nausea curled in my guts.

“I need—” I choke, scrambling to my feet and launching myself towards the bathroom.

_What a catch. Bumbling, sweaty, and projecting his outsides into a toilet bowl. What on earth was I thinking, turning down such a specimen?_

“Fuck off, Baz.” I mumble around a dry heave.

Ten minutes later, after I’ve tossed the entire contents of my stomach into a toilet bowl, Penny barges into the washroom, chucking a pair of jeans at my bowed figure and depositing a cup of black coffee on the edge of the sink.

“I’d say you’ve get about…” she pauses, probably checking the time on her mobile. “Ten minutes? To get out of the flat before you’re late for work.”

I groan, trying to pretend that I’m not covered in a sheen of cold sweat with regret stewing in my chest cavity. “Fucking Tuesdays.”

…

I hadn’t thought I’d end up a social worker. When the pillars of my life decided to vaporize, I hadn’t really done much thinking. I’d just…carried on.

Until I lost Baz.

_You didn’t lose me Snow. You left me. I know you heroic types like to re-write the narrative to soothe your enormous egos, but there is a difference between losing and leaving._

Inner Baz tends to hit the nail on the head. To find the bruises inside of my thoughts and to poke at them until they bleed.

Until I _left_ Baz.

That was when life properly came undone. Baz was the loose end of my story, a snag that the world decided to pull until I was a tangle of string and hangovers and one-night stands and sleepless nights and flashbacks and those hot angry tears that feel like your soul was bleeding.

Penny calls them the Dark Days that hit their peek when she’d insisted that I get an app that let her track my location.

“You’re kinda stalking me Pen. Like those nanny-cams.”

“You forfeited your right to privacy when you slept in the entrance of the apartment block—"

“—It was a dignified slump—”

“—next door!”

Not my best moment.

“Besides,” she’d said, and it was like her words had wrinkles. Penny sounded so tired. “I’m tired of waking up, and realizing you’re not home, and then worrying all night. I’m so fucking tired, Simon.”

Still, even the shittiest days (months…years?) have silver linings. Cause, if I hadn’t let my mess get all over everything. If I hadn’t started running mile after mile in the middle of the night. If I hadn’t stopped coming home or started losing myself in the city at night. Well. I wouldn’t have wandered into the Youth Resource Centre.

And then things would’ve worked out very differently.

…

The hydraulics of the bus hiss and spit as the ancient metal monster spirits me to work. I let my head rest against the cool of the window and try not to thumb at my mobile.

The fucking thoughts are relentless this morning. He texted back. That means _something_ right?

People ask me about social work a lot. About the whys and the hows of it all.

“ _Did you do it cause you were in care?”_ they ask. “ _That’s so self-sacrificing. I’m sure it’ll make you a wonderful worker_.”

“ _Look at you, still saving people_ ,” they say. “ _It makes so much sense_.” 

Good reasons, plausible reasons, all of them. But the truth is…well it’s simpler, isn’t it?

Cause, if I’m being totally honest, in a way that I’ve never really managed to be out loud, it wasn’t any ghosts from my past or misplaced saviour complexes.

It was cinnamon buns.

It’s the cinnamon buns’ fault.

The Youth Resource Centre sits in a seedy end of town, between the best breakfast joint (Stella’s) in all of London and one of the slimiest pubs (Cousin’s). I’d come to know the interior of the pub as well as the inside of my own flat, but that first day, it was the smell of a bakery in the morning that pulled at my feet.

The cinnamon buns at Stella’s taste like a sticky mess of heaven and smell like the last sugary good thing on earth. I wandered into the shop, chasing the scent of perfection like a bloodhound on the prowl. Running away from the headache building behind my eyes and Penny’s lecture about staying out all night.

A smell like that seemed as good a distraction as any. The bell tingled as I pushed my way inside—it still does.

And there was John, annoyingly fit, unwaveringly straight, in his hundred-pound jeans and fitted polo hugging his biceps, ordering two cinnamon buns—he still does this too. Every morning.

“You got here just in time,” the woman behind the counter says, fringe cutting a sharp line across the upper half of her forehead. “These are the last two.”

“What!” I’d legit yelped, without meaning to. And John had looked at me, dark brown eyes laughing, even if his lips were a straight line.

“Got a problem?” he’d asked, looking me up and down. John’s eyeballs have x-ray powers. I’m sure of it.

“Well,” I’d mumbled, shuffling from foot to foot. I’d really stepped in it this time. “I just…they smell so good—”

“Oh, they are.”

“And you just took the last one!”

His eyes dissected me for a second longer than felt socially acceptable. And then he said a few stray words that ended up changing my life. “Alright, stranger. You buy me coffee and I’ll swap you for the most delicious danish on this side of London. And then,” he said, stepping into my space with the confidence of someone who’s used to unexpected conversations. “You’re gonna tell me why you’re in yesterday’s clothes with a couple of black holes under your eyes.”

“I—”

“But we gotta eat it in my office. I’m late for work.”

And that’s the real story.

Of how I wandered into the Youth Resource Centre. And met John. And saw him give the second cinnamon bun to a girl sitting with her back against the brick building. And then have a dozen conversations with the homeless people who’d woken up on a mat and not a bed. And then, hours later, realized that this…this was something worth doing.

I’d started work straight away, on Outreach. Learning to drive the van and giving out sandwiches and water bottles and cleans.

When I had to choose a major, it was the only thing that made sense.

The memory of that first morning still stings—an alcohol swab over an open wound. Sometimes, I wonder what John had seen when he looked at me that morning, but most days I try not to think about it.

Explaining what this place does, what it means for the young people who come here, is a bit like trying to explain a first kiss or soaring through the air on red demon-wings. It’s intangible and essential. For most of our participants, it’s everything.

We’re a shelter overnight, a housing program by day, with mental health workers (me) and income support workers. We have an education program in the basement and an outreach van for the people who can’t come to us. There’s a nurse who works out of what she calls an office but what should actually be called a closet a few doors down from me.

I’m a counsellor first. That’s the title that sings my praises from the business cards on my desk—mental health and addictions counsellor.

I technically have an office, but I also technically share it with four other people. We’re all crammed into the tiny space so close that our knees knock together more often than they don’t, but it’s alright, because everyone…well, they’re here for the right reasons, aren’t they?

I look down at my phone. 8:09 am. Not bad. Just a little later than usual. John probably isn’t even—

“Simon,” John says as I half walk, half crawl into the office. We’re usually the first two people here. The rest wander in around nine, which is fine, because it gives us a quiet moment to decompress. About participants and treatment applications and housing disasters. John is solid and the best kind of cowork—

“You look like frozen dog shit,” he says, peeling off a piece of sticky dough from his cinnamon bun.

“Fuck off,” I half whine, half growl, tossing my leather jacket onto the coatrack and collapsing into my office chair. The broken wheel groans in protest.

“Too harsh?” he says, tossing a me a small paper bag as I set a coffee down on his desk. It’s a well-worn tradition—one we do every morning. He gets the cinnamon buns, I get the coffee. Still, fuck that guy.

“I can’t look that bad.” I checked myself before I left. Even with the self-esteem of an earthworm, my reflection in the mirror Pen’s got up by the front door wasn’t obviously offensive.

“Do you really want me to respond to that?” John is a cheeky fucker, I don’t mind saying.

“Fuck off.”

“Good one,” John says, leaning back in his chair and taking a long sip of coffee. “Your comebacks are always so creative.”

Banter takes energy and I’m fresh out. I settle on a generic growl and start up my ancient computer. John x-rays me and I try to pretend I don’t notice.

“Is it just the hangover, or is it something else?”

Stupid perceptive robot.

“It’s nothing.”

John smiles, rolling into my space on his stupid wheely office chair. “So, something did happen! Oh, Simon. Do tell.”

I can smell the coffee on his breath. “Drop it.” Still growling. The Windows sign is glowing against a black screen.

“C’mon Simon. Bad luck convincing someone to come home with you?”

My growls are escalating.

“Oh, getting warmer, am I?” I’m going to tear John’s smirk off with my fingernails. “NO! Not that! I bet he refused to leave!”

“John—”

“And that’s why you’re late! You made him breakfast. Cause—” He gestures so wildly, his coffee sloshing over the edge of the paper cup. “You can’t say no so you made the pushy aresehole brekky!”

“Fuck!” I slam my hand on the desk and stare at John with real anger in my eyes. The laughter on his face dies. “It’s not any of that. I—”

Words are crowding around my lips and I don’t know how to let them through.

“Simon,” John says, his voice softening. “You don’t have to—I didn’t mean—”

“I texted my ex.”

The office is quiet. So quiet I can hear the clock on the wall. Tick tick ticking.

John swallows and lets the confession settle on the room. Like dust after the end of the world.

“Are you,” John says, taking a deep breath, “talking about the ex who we are never to speak of?”

“Yes,” I mumble.

“Upon penalty of slashed tires and that angry thing you do with your face?”

I roll my eyes, but I can’t look at him, so the effect’s a bit lessened. “Yeah.”

“The ex whose Instagram you stalk on the daily and I’m not allowed to comment on this because it makes you want to punch things?”

_Oh Snow, how charmingly creepy. I see that your behaviours in fifth year are not an isolated incident. That you’ve cultivated the stalker chique._

Fuck inner Baz. And John. And this whole fucking day. “Yes.”

“The same ex who you ramble on about after like three drinks because he was the one and you fucked it up beyond repair and it will never work out because he is too good and you are…” John pauses for inspiration. “Frozen dog shit?”

“I hate you.” I really really do.

“I take it that’s a yes.” John isn’t laughing at me. He’s pushing and nudging and being an incorrigible (thoughtful) prat. But he’s not laughing at me.

“Yeah, that ex.”

“The one you’ve talked about in such detail, and so often, that I think I may have fallen in love with him.”

“You’re straight.”

“Incurably. Which makes it all the more remarkable.”

“I hate you so much,” I say, but my lips are twitching and the rage-panic I’ve been carrying all morning starts to settle.

“Sure you do. Now. Are you gonna show me?”

I look up at his stupid, overconfident, thoughtful face and let the broken sigh tumble from my lips. “I guess,” I moan, fumbling with my mobile and handing it over.

It only takes him a second to read the exchange; there’s not much to it.

“And I thought I was a fucking idiot,” he says, finally and I can’t help it. I laugh. It feels good. I’d forgotten how good laughing could feel.

If I’m being honest with myself—in those secret moments when I manage it—I’m not really sure the Dark Days Penny talked about ever ended.

Penny (and everyone else) just got used to a shittier version of me.

I still run until my lungs are raw and my feet are bleeding. The last bloke I pulled said he could play music on my body, as his fingers traced the lines of my ribcage. I grabbed him by the wrists (he was touching me. Too soft. Too much) and focused on his long black hair and tried to blot out everything else. He hadn’t commented on my scars. Those ghostly bumps on my shoulder blades. At least that was something.

I still drink too much and the thoughts still come too fast. I still watch them die when I close my eyes and sometimes when I’m on the bus to work or chatting with a youth or grabbing a cuppa.

“I’m a mental health social worker and…” I cradle my mobile as John hands it back to me. “And my mental health’s underground,” I say, mostly by accident.

As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I’m sure he’s going to stage an intervention, interrogate my life choices, divine all of my problems from the lines under my eyes. Instead, he punches me in the shoulder and says, “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

My open mouth gives my shock away.

“What? You think that you can watch people suffer like we do and come out shiny and clean? Fuck, Simon, we’re all drowning. We’re just doing it together.” 

…

“Text him back,” John says, while I thumb at my mobile for the thousandth time, as we drive a participant to pick up their prescription.

“He can’t hear you brooding,” John says later, as we walk into the detox on Main, flashing our lanyards and depositing a couple of coffees on the receptionist’s desk (“Best way to win ‘em over is with free hot beverages,” John had said on my second day). “Text him!”

He’s at it again in the middle of the drop-in space, when Marcel is charging between the leather couches, ready to put Tommy though the wall. “Seriously. You’ve been pining all fucking day,” he says, as he steps neatly up to Marcel’s side, hooks him by the elbow, and says, “come on Marcel. Let’s go have a smoke.”

I roll my eyes and walk Tommy into the kitchen—it’s spaghetti today—and start spooning him out some noodles. “You’ll feel better if you eat,” I say, pressing him into a seat and grabbing a fork.

“John told me you’ve got someone you need to text?” Tommy says, pushing a diced tomato around the plate.

“He got to you too?” I mutter under my breath. “Aleister Crowley.”

“Is that who you’re texting?” Tommy says, his eyes a mood ring, shifting from anger to curiosity. “That’s a weird fucking name.”

“You have no idea,” I say, trying to swallow my grin.

Baz has been an itch that I’d never dared scratch. For three years, I kept my hands off, resisted the urgent need to know. Know if he was happy, if he was dating, what he was doing and how he was doing it.

I wanted to know so many things, like if he’d decided to pursue magical medicine. The germ of an idea must’ve started with my wings. “Magick can be woven into our bodies,” he’d said, staring at me with something so intense in those grey eyes. “Can I…?” Memories of his hands tracing my wingtips, pressing kisses into the leathery flesh only to have me flinch and yell and push. I pushed him so far out of my orbit, it’s a miracle he stayed as long as he did.

_And to think, I waited for you to leave me? Masochism at its finest._

Now that I’ve let my fingers prod the burning desire to _know_ , to reach out and trace the outline of what we used to be—fuck, my body feels like it’s crawling with him and the need to scratch is overwhelming. I want it all.

I stomp out of the Youth Resource Centre at 4:30pm, John’s voice wafting up the stairs: “Don’t come in tomorrow unless you’ve texted him back, Simon! I don’t want another day of your brooding sulk.”

“I dunno,” Caryn (our education coordinator) shouts across the basement. “I think it’s kinda hot.”

“See! Don’t come back until you can be your normal awkward self!” John is still shouting. “You’re stealing my thunder!”

I flip them both the V and push out into the crisp autumn air, thoughts of dark hair and grey eyes swirling like the leaves falling all around me. 

…

It’s past midnight before I start to type. This time of night has been especially hard since…well, since everything went to shit. These hours are where the deepest darkness lives. This is when the flashbacks have the most colour and the thoughts dig their fingers into my brain and tear it to shreds.

_please do not contact me again_

“ _Text him_ ,” John had said, a thousand times.

_the knowledge that you are alive is not unwelcome_

My fingers tap against the white screen.

**Simon, draft, unsent (12:21 am): Basilton bloody Grimm-Pitch, I miss you and I wanna see you or talk to you or, fuck, ill take whatever youll give me really. I just want you and god, id do anything just tell me what you need. Tell me what I need to do to make it better.**

Fuck, that’s too much. I can’t just send him my stream of consciousness. He won’t like it. I hold my thumb on the backspace button.

**Simon, draft, unsent (12:28 am): i cant stop thinking about you**

Fuck, that’s weird and creepy, isn’t it?

_No more than usual, Snow._

**Simon, draft, unsent (12:35 am): i never told you. it kills me that i never told you. and now i might never get to. and i cant...fuck**

Do I want him more freaked out than he is already?

Fuck, I need to send something. Anything.

**Simon (12:37 am): i dont know what to say**

_How eloquent. That gives him so many openings to reply. Such a scintillating piece of dialog._

“Shut up inner Baz,” I growl and wait.

Gulp.

Pillage his Instagram.

Run my fingers across the most recent photo, trying to remember what his jaw felt like. We follow each other. We watch each other’s stories. We both know it. And we don’t address it.

There’s an itch behind my eyeballs. Residue from a vicious hangover and a long day and the ache of missing Basilton fucking Grimm-Pitch. I stare at the message, rubbing my thumbs over each letter, waiting.

I don’t know when I start to cry. Fucking itch, pushing down my cheeks. Because, of course inner Baz is right and of course this is how it turns out.

I stare at the screen for a long time, fingers tracing the letters as the yawing pit inside of my skull opens its mouth and lets the thoughts come in.

_You killed them._

_Blood. So much blood. Pooling around her body. Staining the world red._

_You’re broken, Simon. I couldn’t fix you._

_A sharp pain in my back, reaching into my chest, stabbing and cutting and **it hurts. Why won’t they stop cutting—**_

_The worst chosen one ever chosen._

_The worst, full stop._

“Fuck, please stop.” But they don’t. Of course they don’t.

I curl into a ball. Clutch my phone to my chest. Glance up at my alarm clock. 1:02 am. And then start to type.

**Simon (1:02 am): past one o’clock exception? pls. baz. please.**

Nothing. Still nothing.

_Simon my boy._

_They all died because of you. All of them. And you could’ve saved them. If you’d seen it sooner._

_Her pale blonde hair, like a halo._

_Blood drip dripping onto the floor, soaking the bleached white sheet clean through. I flex my shoulders and realize that my key to the sky is gone._

_Baz’s face, his eyes, at the airport. And me, walking away. There’d been tears. Silent tears._

Fuck it. I need to run or dance or drink or do something that’s not this.

My feet hit the cool floor and I scramble for my mobile. Running. Tonight, I’ll run until I’m too tired and the memories finally fucking stop. And then, I look down at the screen and see something so simple, but so consequential, that I almost drop the thing.

Three dots.

Blinking.

Underneath my last message.

Baz. Baz Pitch is typing.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Strutting peacocks, frozen dog shit, and the cold hard truth that nothing is sexier than respect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will be updating every couple of days, I think, until done :)  
> Thank you for reading!

**Baz**

Of course, it wasn’t enough for him to disrupt my sleep, to leave me with three hours of broken R.E.M, waiting for a reply I’d expressly told him not to send.

The morning after that first catastrophic text, when no peacocks had strutted into the silence of my flat and there were no unread messages on my home screen, I tried to forget about it.

It was one message. I didn’t need to imbue what amounted to a drunken mistake with anything more meaningful. I decided to put it out of my mind.

As it turned out, trying to put Snow out of my mind failed catastrophically and almost immediately.

Because it’s Simon. And nothing about him is inconsequential.

Not to me.

By noon, and in-between a flurry of first years rushing to and fro across campus, I’d convinced myself that Snow messaged me by accident. That he had met another Basil or Chaz or had messaged the first B in his phone by mistake. My reply had been sharp as old cheddar and so he was just being polite in his distance. Best not to inflame old wounds.

By four in the afternoon, at the back of a dusty seminar room in the middle of a lecture about the dangers of magickal body modification, any voice of reason was a stray tumble weed in a desert of rage. My anger was frothing at the mouth, potential messages burning toxic and hot, desperate to spring to life. How dare he listen? For the first time in his fucking life? The absolute gall. Trust Simon Snow to be reasonable when all I want is for him to beg for my attention.

By six that evening, in the middle of my seventh cup of coffee and my first meal of the day, I’d examined every single photo of him that exists in digital space. Stroked my thumb across the golden curls that were no longer mine and decided that it was for the best. That he’d always burned too hot, and that, were I exposed to much more of this ridiculous man, I was not likely to survive it.

I had finally—finally!—put him from my mind, for the first time all day, as the night approached one am.

Magick hour.

The sound of a mating peacock startled my bladder so thoroughly, I nearly had an accident.

Of course, it wasn’t enough for him to occupy centre stage of my entire fucking day and then leave me to sleep in peace. It’s never enough.

**Simon (12:37 am): i dont know what to say**

My rage at the simplicity of the message, of how he can say five words and still manage to set my sanity adrift, is blinding.

And I’m angry.

I’m so fucking angry.

The only answer for a text that stupid—that unyielding and unapologetic and idiotic—is no answer at all.

I leave the fucking chosen one on read.

For approximately 15 minutes. Until the squawk of a peafowl rends the air.

**Simon (1:02 am): past one o’clock exception? pls. baz. please.**

For a moment, I can’t believe what I’m seeing (He remembered) (That tiny story that slipped out) (Late at night) (When I was sure he was going to leave me) (He remembered…)

It is a cocktail of my weaknesses. A recipe designed to take me apart. In a way so simple and so total that only someone who knew the undersides of me would be able to write it.

Memories of my mother and a plea from Simon Snow.

I didn’t stand a chance.

_Baz (1:05 am): What do you want from me, Snow?_

**Simon (1:05 am): i dunno. im sorry i dunno im just...im a mess baz.**

**Simon (1:05 am): and im sorry i messaged you like this. sorry. so sorry**

It’s been too long to know _what_ has him stirred up and messy like this, but I’d recognize the panic anywhere.

It hurts.

Everything about this hurts.

_Baz (1:06 am): Rambling apologies are a bit late to the party, Snow. There’s really no need._

And then, because I’m weak.

_Baz (1:06 am): Tell me what’s wrong._

It’s like when he lifted himself above me, that night when we moved together in the low light of a dying fire, except he’s not here and I’m still reaching.

Still crossing every line.

**Simon (1:06 am): sometimes its like im drowning**

**Simon (1:07 am): and i cant breath and the memories are behind my eyes so i cant make them stop. cant make them stop**

I start to respond—to try to respond, because how do I even begin to try to navigate _that_ message—but he’s still typing, three little dots dancing beneath my thumbs.

**Simon (1:07 am): fucking hell. ignore that. ignore all of that. fuck, yeah dont touch any of my fucking mess. just…**

_Baz (1:07 am): What do you need?_

**Simon (1:08 am): tell me how you are? tell me anything so long as its about you**

There is no way, no force on this planet that could compel me to start down that—

**Simon (1:08 am): please**

_Baz (1:08 am): I’m…Crowley Snow. Where do I even begin?_

**Simon (1:08 am): the beginning i guess?**

More like the end. The end of us. 

_Baz (1:09 am): Well, I finished my undergraduate degree, in pre-medicine. Chemistry major. Yes, I know, you told me so. But if I’m spilling my secrets to you at this most ungodly hour, you will not be allowed any self-righteous behaviours._

_Baz (1:09 am): No I-told-you-sos permitted, Snow. This is a non-negotiable part of…whatever this is._

**Simon (1:09 am): ill do whatever you tell me. just keep talking**

_Baz (1:10 am): This isn’t exactly talking._

**Simon (1:10 am): close enough**

My heart is doing 100km an hour in first gear. Fuck, I need to try to control whatever thing I’ve allowed to happen before I lose myself in the juggernaut that is Simon Snow’s attention. 

_Baz (1:11 am): Snow. I’m not sure talking to you is good for me._

**Simon (1:11 am): im sorry. so so sorry**

I cannot abide his sorrys.

_Baz (1:11 am): Rule one: no I-told-you-sos. Addendum a) to rule one: also, absolutely no apologies. I’ll not have you assuaging your guilt complex at my expense._

**Simon (1:12 am): wait. gotta google addendum and assuaging**

_Baz (1:12 am): You’re hopeless._

And so am I.

**Simon (1:12 am): thats what you always said**

_Baz (1:13 am): I’m always right._

**Simon (1:13 am): i know**

_Baz (1:14 am): Rule two: don’t just lay down and take my sass. You’re better than that, Simon Snow._

**Simon (1:14 am): am i?**

_Baz (1:14 am): What did I just say about taking my sass?_

**Simon (1:14 am): your such a fucking wanker**

_Baz (1:14 am): *you’re_

_Baz (1:15 am): And that’s better_

My lips are twitching and, Merlin help me, I think I’m smiling. Holding a rectangle of artificial light between my shaking fingers and grinning like a numpty. This will not fucking do.

**Simon (1:15 am): i was so nervous to message so so so nervous but…its nice isnt it? talking?**

It is. Too nice. Too easy. Too much.

Interactions with Simon Snow lead to a ledge, with a thousand foot drop. If I stray too close, he’ll convince me to fly with him and we’ll spill head over heels into the weightless free fall together. And…I can’t. I just can’t.

_Baz (1:16 am): One more rule, Snow. I’m going to need you to take this one seriously._

His responses are lightening. I barely have time to think about what I’m going to say next.

**Simon (1:16 am): i forgot how bossy you are**

_Baz (1:16 am): This is important to me, Snow._

He notices the change in tone, and reflects it back at me.

**Simon (1:16 am): sure. anything baz**

I should tell him to disappear. Should reassert my request that we never speak again. My best course of action is to delete this entire idiotic conversation—this blatant and purposeful jaunt into masochism—and block the idiot blathering on the end of the line. But it’s Simon.

The best I’ll ever be able to do is limit the damage.

_Baz (1:17): Please don’t message me during the day._

**Simon (1:17 am): what do you mean**

_Baz (1:17 am): The past one o’clock exception needs to continue._

**Simon (1:17 am): but baz i don’t get…i dont**

_Baz (1:18 am): I can’t have you popping in and out of my day._

**Simon (1:18 am): but baz…i want…**

_Baz (1:18 am): It’s too much, Simon. You’re too much._

_Baz (1:19 am): If it’s just in these hours, when you can’t sleep and I won’t sleep…well, then I’ll manage._

Pretend that it’s not real. Any more than that, and I won’t survive it.

_Baz (1:19 am): You may have the past one o’clock exception. But that’s it._

That’s all I have to give.

Those three dots dance for a long time. So long that I’m worried I’ll have a rambling novel of sins against grammatical propriety and a fast and loose relationship with capitalization.

But no. All I—eventually—get is

**Simon (1:25 am): okay baz. anything. ill take anything**

Those words should have sent a spike of hope through my belly; they shouldn’t have felt ominous.

I shouldn’t want more than this.

I shouldn’t want him at all.

But I do.

Crowley, I do.

And I think it might kill me.

**Simon**

Blue light winks across my face as I stare down at the unlikely collection of shared messages. I wait for those three infuriating dots to start dancing—I want another message. Just one more, and then another, and another until my eyes ache with exhaustion but Baz is still talking.

But my phone remains resolutely dot-less.

Still, he answered. It’s hard to believe, even with the evidence in front of me—he should hate me, he should have my number super mega blocked. He should have a restraining order against the digits of my mobile.

_But I’ve never had much sense when it comes to you, Snow. You know that._

I trace my thumb across the messages, trying to convince myself that they exist and that I get to have this. A few hours a day, where Baz won’t ignore me and my chest won’t feel like its inside out, internal organs tender against London’s muggy air.

If I close my eyes, maybe the pads of my fingers will translate text messages into memories I can bear and dreams that aren’t terrifying. What a lovely thing it would be, to dream of the urgent crush of his lips on mine, cool fingers sneaking under my shirt, gentle kisses against my monstrous leather wings.

It’s too much to hope for. I dream of blood pooling like a halo, of blood raining from the sky, of blood on my sword and blood on the gravel. Blood seeping through my skin and down my back. Off of the operating table as my wings flail feebly. Blood and monsters and there’s nothing I can do to change any of it.

…

“You look like shit.” I barley intercept the cinnamon bun, flung at me from across the room.

I try to muster a ‘fuck off’ but barely manage a growl.

John’s got a nose for trouble and trauma; he scented me as a degenerate basket case from the moment he met me.

“I thought yesterdays I-came-to-work-hungover bit was rock bottom, at least where your appearance was concerned,” he goes on, determined to push my buttons this early in the morning. “Lo and behold, you’ve managed to prove me wrong. Well done, Simon.”

“Fuck. Off.” The words are gravel in a garburator. I slam a cup of coffee on his desk, kick off my shoes, and let my chair recline as far back as it will go.

“Someone didn’t get their beauty sleep,” John says. If he’s ever been bothered by my darker moods—which are not common but also not unheard of—he’s never shown it. He’s looking at me now the way that he always looks at me—with a smooth face that somehow manages to be calming and inquiring all at once.

“No. If you must know. I didn’t.” It’s a concession. John knows I sleep like shit, but only because the nightmares leave their bruises under my eyes for all to see.

“Why not?”

We’ve had this conversation before.

_Don’t be stupid Snow. This frustratingly handsome straight man has tried to talk to you about it, and you’ve hidden under your desk._

I am not in the mood for inner Baz this morning. Or real John. Or anyone.

“Cause I fucking said so!” I half shout across our empty office.

I’m being a giant git and I know it and that makes it worse.

John doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t yell. My words don’t dent the armour of his face. “I don’t think I’ve ever known you not tired. Seriously, Simon. I can’t remember a day where you came in looking…not…”

“Like frozen dog shit?” I try, hoping that a joke will smooth everything over.

“Like you’d slept through the night,” John says instead. “Like you’ve ever woken up and felt okay.”

“I do my job just fine.”

“Of course you do,” John says, his voice deflating a little. “That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

“Best get around to what you’re trying to say, then.” I’m halfway to boiling over.

“Nightmares—”

“—I never said anything about—”

“—Jumping every time someone touches you. Fuck, even a pat on the back—”

“—I don’t—”

“—You see danger everywhere. I’m not a psychiatrist, but PTSD can destroy your life, Simon—”

“Please,” I say, gritting my teeth. “Shut up.” The conversation is dangerous now.

“If you don’t want to talk to me, that’s fine. But you need to talk to someone.” 

“If I wanted a counsellor, I would’ve asked for a fucking referral.” I squeeze my eyes shut so I won’t have to see the disappointment that creeps like a flush across John’s face.

_Why are you so terrified of letting someone in?_

“I’m worried—” John starts.

“Well, that’s not really _my_ problem, is it?”

I don’t know why I’m being like this. Why I’m angry all the time. Why—

I hear the groan of his ancient squishy chair that means John is getting up. I wait for a snarky reply, the scathing words I know I deserve.

“If you ever change your mind, Simon.” He pauses and I can feel him standing beside me, can sense the tension under his smooth words. “I’m listening. No questions. No judgement.”

When the door closes behind me, I nearly sob in relief.

_Struggling to play well with others, Chosen One?_

“No,” I mumble. _Yes,_ I think.

…

The first thing I did after I got back from America was break up with Baz—right there in the arrival’s terminal like the worst human on the fucking planet. We didn’t make it out of the airport. The second thing I did was learn to drive well enough to get my Learner’s.

It was a good thing too, because I’d needed it to work at the YRC before I got official looking papers declaring me a social worker and certified counsellor.

“Only opening we got right now is on Outreach,” John had said, three fucking years ago, when I’d still been bleeding out with how much I fucking missed the boyfriend I’d thrown away.

“Uh…”

“Lemme introduce you to Scott,” he’d said, marching past my indecision and up to a thirty something bloke, who looked like he was built out of wiry muscle and nicotine.

“Scott,” John had said. “Meet Simon. He’s gonna be working with you on Outreach.”

“I am?” I should’ve had more to say, but I couldn’t stop staring at the way the fluorescent light played off of his bald head.

“Simon eh?” he’d said, giving me a cheeky grin.

I reached my hand into the space between us and he took it, his fingers long and thin like Baz’s.

Handshakes shouldn’t be so instructive, but this one was. In that moment, I knew that he could take a punch to the chin and keep on grinning. I knew that he’d seen the harder side of things and come out, not whole, but still kicking and screaming—in an intangible way that would make sense later. I knew that I’d taken the job as soon as I took his hand. Cause some things just feel right like that.

“He’ll do,” Scott had said, and then. “Let’s go for a drive.”

When the rest of the world was a vortex of blood and regret, Scott became a constant. These five words were how I’d started my days for the next two years.

_“Let’s go for a drive.”_

A part of me knows that it’s not John’s fault that I haven’t slept sober or through the night in months. That it’s also not his fault that my feelings are so close to the surface—that I’ve decided to explore the gooey hole in my life where Baz used to be and that it’s killing me.

I know I shouldn’t’ve snapped and I know John’s just trying to help and I know all of that. And I’m still so mad, I can barely think.

I definitely stomp up the stairs. I also definitely stew in a pit of fury during the entire morning huddle, letting John give the update on our participants without looking up from my feet.

I should’ve known it was coming, really, letting my feelings show all over my face.

“Simon!” I hear Scott’s familiar bark from across the room.

Fuck.

Scott knows my pissed-off face as well as anyone but Penny; we worked together every day for literal years. Plural.

The slippery bugger has already crossed the room and is slapping me on the back—I try not to flinch. “You’re coming with me in the van today.”

“But John—”

“Is a big boy who managed fine before you showed up.”

“Hey!” I say, too offended to pout.

“I didn’t say he managed _well_ ,” Scott says, and the arsehole winks at me. “But he’ll be okay for the day. You look like you could skin a raccoon with a potato peeler.”

“You’re a fucking weirdo,” I say, but I know I’m grinning. “And yeah. That’s about right.”

“C’mon golden boy,” he says, jabbing me in the meaty part of my shoulder. “Let’s go for a drive.”

It’s been a long time since my first days at the YRC. When Scott had taken me to the parts of the city that come alive at night.

“Outreach is simple really,” he’d said as we cruised down streets I’d never been. “It’s knowing where to find the folks who can’t find us.”

“What do you mean?” I truly hadn’t known.

“Some people can’t just trot down Sherbrook during regular business hours for a meal,” Scott said, his eyes trained on the road, one hand hanging loosely from the steering wheel. “So, we go to them.”

We’d followed railroad tracks into the industrial neighbourhoods. “Mostly low track sex workers out here. A few homeless folks, but they don’t stay long.”

I looked through the glass at hunched shoulders and long shadows. “It’s so far out,” I whispered into the pane.

Scott took a long draw from his cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. “Less people around, but the ones who know what they’re looking for know where to come.”

“Oh,” I’d said.

Fucking ‘Oh’.

“Less coppers too.”

We’d flown over the pavement, into the streets where tents cropped up from time to time before the officers came to tear them down.

“Fucking pigs,” Scott’d said.

“People don’t like to look at it,” I’d muttered.

“Like that’s a good enough reason to tear down the only scraps of a home that someone’s got.”

I hadn’t had much to say to that.

“ _Think for yourself, Simon_.” I can hear Penny in my head. She’d said that to me after the Mage had died and I’d adapted it as a mantra.

The ease with which Scott navigates the city reveals more than a resume. “How long’ve you been doing this?” I’d asked that first night, as we skated from place to place.

“Going on ten years,” he’d said.

I would eventually learn the routes he would take, depending on the day of the week and the weather. And Scott would eventually let me drive (although that came much later).

But the rest was simple. It was plastic water bottles passed through open windows, it was bandages wrapped and cleans slipped into hands without judgement. It was a hundred sandwiches in cellophane for someone who didn’t have a next meal coming.

It was the first thing I’d done that felt like it was _worth_ doing.

You wouldn’t think it would take so little. It was the way something so simple could help reluctance can melt into trust.

“Sometimes, folks forget what it’s like to…have someone be kind.” Scott had said a lot of things that first night. This one stayed. “So we remind them.”

Without the Mage preaching his righteous cause or professors promising benediction. It was hard, and painful sometimes, and it was real.

…

“Can I drive?” I say, knowing the answer and already heading for the passenger’s seat.

“Fat chance,” Scott says, flicking his butt into the snow and squishing it under his shoe.

“Worth a shot,” I say, slipping inside and trying to blot out the hair metal I know is about to pour out of the speakers. The outreach van is ancient and smells like stale cigarettes.

Scott backs out of the parking lot and we’re drifting with the traffic before he asks, “What’s got your looking like a bulldog’s arsehole?”

My sigh sounds like the air sputtering out of the heaters.

“John’s a tad on the self-righteous side,” Scott offers, “but he’s a good bloke underneath all that.”

“I know,” I groan, pushing my hands into my curls and trying to tug answers from my skull. “It’s not John.” (Fuck, this means I’m gonna have to apologize) (goddammit). “He was just in the wrong place when at the wrong time. In front of me when I was—”

“—being a pissy little bitch?”

I’m smiling again. Fucking Scott. “Something like that.”

“So, what’s actually got your knickers in a twist?”

_Yes, Snow, what is it?_

The long answer to that question is buried beneath sleepless nights and feet on the pavement, under the buzz of too much alcohol and the feel of a stranger in the middle of the night, in memories of blood and the feeling of knives on my skin and of losing so much so goddamn fast.

The short answer is almost as honest.

“It’s…well…it’s an ex.”

Scott’s laugh is rough around the edges—like the rest of him. “Isn’t it always.”

There are stray water bottles rolling around in the back of the van. Slowly, to the hum of Iron Maiden and (unexpectedly) Cher, I start to talk and try to explain.

“So, you can’t talk to him before one in the morning?” Scott asks after I’ve got most of the story out.

“That’s pretty much it.”

“What’s the problem?”

“I…” Fuck, I’m not even sure I know that answer to that. “I just…I want _more_.”

“Hmmm,” Scott says, another cigarette dangling from his lips. “You’re the one who fucked this up, right?”

It should sting, the bluntness of Scott’s honesty. But I’m used to it. “Oh, definitely.”

“Then I say you respect his boundaries.”

I open my mouth to protest, to insist that it’s not that simple.

Until I realize that…well…it is.

“Respect his boundaries,” I say, a bit softer this time, and mostly to my knees.

“There’s nothing sexier than respect,” Scott says, and he’s so serious, I can barely stand to look at him.

…

**Simon (1:01 am): its past one oclock**

_Baz (1:05 am): I should think the time stamp would make that obvious._

**Simon (1:05 am): your a fucking prick**

_Baz (1:05 am): I don’t correct half of your glaring grammatical mishaps. You should really be_ _thanking me. I’m showing remarkable restraint in the “fucking prick” department._

The urge to make a dick joke is overpowering, but I don’t wanna scare him off.

Not now that I just got him back.

**Simon (1:05 am): so uh**

**Simon (1:05 am): how was your day????**

_Baz (1:06 am): I can’t believe you still manage to stammer via text. Who actually takes the_ _time to put their bluster into letters?_

**Simon (1:06 am): are you trying to piss me off or are you dodging the question???**

_Baz (1:06 am): You really only need one question mark to punctuate the end of your sentences. Must you insist on being excessive in every aspect of your life?_

**Simon (1:06 am): dodging the question then**

_Baz (1:06 am): I am not. My day was fine._

**Simon (1:07 am): fine???????????**

_Baz (1:07 am): Now your just trying to piss me off._

**Simon (1:07 am): OH! *you’re**

_Baz (1:08 am): I was typing quickly. It was a simple mistake._

**Simon (1:08 am): the great king of fancy words**

_Baz (1:08 am): Snow, do shut up._

**Simon (1:08 am): corrector of grammmer**

_Baz (1:08 am): *grammar_

**Simon (1:08 am): speaker of five languages and reader of a zillion books**

_Baz (1:08 am): Now YOU’RE just being petty._

**Simon (1:09 am): how the mighty have fallen**

_Baz (1:09 am): Fuck you._

I’m laughing. I wonder if he is too.

**Baz**

I’m laughing and it’s cracking the foundations of my heart.

How do you forget the stare of those blue eyes? So intense that nothing else in the world exists when he’s looking at you?

How do you use your fingers after they’ve known the feel of thick golden curls, pushed back off his forehead early in the morning?

How can you feel the heat of a match when you’ve burned in the arms of the sun?

Boxes. Memories packaged and stored in steel and pushed down down down. And now, a few peals of laughter and everything is coming undone.

_Baz (1:10 am): My day, Snow? That’s what you want to know about?_

**Simon (1:10 am): so badly**

His interest won’t stick. Soon, he’ll be bored with me. Or worse, he’ll remember that I don’t fit into the post-war, post American life that he’s built for himself. That, like last time, I won’t be enough—

 _No._ It’s taken three years and a level of scrutiny and self-reflection that still makes me ache, but I don’t need to be enough to fix Simon Snow. I deserve more than the scraps of himself he has left to give.

I press my palms into the soft squish of eyelids and try to stop the bubbles of laughter from turning to tears. 

_You’ll be the death of me Simon Snow._

**Simon**

The next text takes a few minutes to come in.

_Baz (1:16 am): My day was perfectly adequate, Snow. Nothing much out of the ordinary._

**Simon (1:16 am): tell me**

_Baz (1:16 am): You’re insatiable._

It’s past one o’clock and so I decide to take a risk.

**Simon (1:16 am): only when it comes to you**

He ignores it.

_Baz (1:17): I’m studying at Hippocrates School of Medicine, focusing my studies on how non-magick procedures and research can be integrated with spells and magickal objects. And yes, I know you’re already yawning, my work is boring, etcetera. Believe me, you won’t be the first person who tends to dissociate whenever I start speaking about my research interests._

I can practically taste his sarcasm, that bite at the end of his words that I know from eight years of sharing a life at the top of a tower. I know it masks a pit of insecurity.

I think he wants me to correct him. So I do.

**Simon (1:17 am): im not bored, baz**

_Baz (1:17 am): Well, it’s a relief that your attention span has become a bit more elastic._

Which is Baz for, thank you.

**Simon (1:18 am): what made you wanna study normal meicidne? ike, isnt magick a bit more advanced???**

_Baz (1:18 am): A younger version of me may have thought so. But no, Snow. Magick and our methods still cannot cure cancer or HIV/AIDS. Human ailments do not respond well to magickal treatments. Very few mages have attempted to combine the two or tried to take the best from best worlds, as it were._

My thumbs are composing a reply when another text comes in.

_Baz (1:18 am): It was your wings, actually, that drew me to the subject. At least, it was at first._

My phone drops to the floor. I barely hear it go.

Because my hands are reaching, without thought or intention, for muscled red leather that I know I’ll never be able to touch. Not again.

Not after—

**Simon (1:19 am): i dont i cant talk about my wings**

Flashes of blood. Of gloved hands poking at the muscles of my heart and pulling it apart like cheese string. Of crying and bandages and ghosts.

I expect a fight. Words dashed across touchscreens, asking questions and demanding answers and then the finding out. Knowing. That horrible exposed feeling, where Baz finally sees how weak I am. How broken.

But he doesn’t

_Baz (1:20 am): Alright._

**Simon (1:20 am): thanks**

_Baz (1:20 am): I’m not here to interrogate you. You’re doing enough of that for the both of us._

**Simon (1:21 am): its nice to talk**

**Simon (1:21 am): to know what your up to**

_Baz (1:21 am): Merlin, we’re not doing that again, are we?_

**Simon (1:21 am): what???????**

_Baz (1:22 am): Never mind._

**Simon (1:22 am): are you happy?**

_Baz (1:22 am): I enjoy my studies, yes._

**Simon (1:22 am): no. i meant are you happy**

I’m not sure why I send that and I’m fairly sure he won’t answer. That he’ll send back something witty and cutting and so Baz, it will make my stomach hurt.

And then I realize, as I see the letters of his reply appear on my screen, that honesty can make me bleed, too.

_Baz (1:23 am): It’s getting better every day._

The stream of conversation filtering through my head stutters and then stops.

He’s happy.

And thank Merlin for that. Cause if anyone deserves to carve a life out of the mess I made, it’s Baz Pitch.

**Simon (1:24 am): baz**

**Simon (1:24 am): its nice**

**Simon (1:24 am): to know your gonna be okay**

Those three dancing dots have hypnotic powers; I can’t look away.

 _Baz (1:25 am): Rule three: sentimentality must be kept to an absolute minimum. No blubbering_ _sweet nothings. It’s morose and only manageable in small doses._

_Baz (1:25 am): I spent most of my life on the opposite end of your obsession or your sword. You are many things, Simon Snow, but a Hallmark Card is not one of them_

**Simon (1:25 am): i cant figure out if thats meant to be a compliment or not**

_Baz (1:26 am): Neither, Snow. It’s just you._

No Baz. It’s just us.

_Baz (1:26 am): Now go away. I need to sleep, lest I disintegrate into a puddle of average._

**Simon (1:26 am): your so dramatic**

_Baz (1:27 am): I’ll not be dignifying that with a response._

**Simon (1:27 am): night baz**

_Baz (1:44 am): Good night, Snow._

**Baz**

It’s a simple thing: exchanging good nights. It’s as innocuous as a raised hand in welcome or a hello-how-are-you-today. This simple salutation shouldn’t— _doesn’t_ —mean anything.

Until I realize that this is the first time that Simon has ever texted me good night.

The melodrama is palpable; I know I’m catastrophizing. Making something out of nothing. Snow hadn’t liked his mobile in those dark months after Watford. That’s why he rarely texted back—right? Why so many of my questions went unanswered. So many times left on read I’d never really expected anything else. But I can’t help the strange explosion of joy that’s leaking out of me in manic giggles.

I was still laughing as the tears fell out of my eyes.

I stare at the ceiling and laugh (and cry) and laugh (and cry) and laugh (and cry).


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snow out there and Snow in here.  
> Prescient.  
> Inevitable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note of warning: this chapter is the reason this fic is rated M. There's a fairly graphic medical scene coming up and if that sort of thing is triggering for you, please please skip it. The section begins with "I don't think this is a good idea, Simon" and is over when you see "Tile floor. Steam, that should be hot."  
> Only three more chapters after this one. It's all going so quickly! Happy reading <3

**Baz**

It’s snowing.

Tiny specs of white wobbling their way from cloud to pavement. Slow and gentle and completely unprecedented at the end of October.

Fall is supposed to be in its death throes, but this?

It feels prescient.

It feels inevitable.

It feels like the weather is laughing in my face.

I pull the soft throw blanket off the couch and walk towards the balcony. The streetlights are filtering through the flakes, a thousand pinpricks of light refracting, coaxing these hours of the night into something special.

I reach out and press my fingers against the glass, just as my phone vibrates in the pocket of my flannel pyjamas. The messages started pouring in at exactly 1:00 am, as if Snow has a stockpile from the day saved up, queued and at the ready. We’ve been at it for twenty minutes.

Snow out there and Snow in here.

Prescient.

Inevitable.

**Simon (1:25 am): are you ever gonna tell me about your research?**

**Simon (1:25 am): the later it gets the sleepier i get**

_Baz (1:25 am): Are you calling my research boring, Snow? I’ll have you know, that there is no swifter way to find yourself a blocked caller._

**Simon (1:25 am): no no im not saying that**

**Simon (1:25 am): im just confused**

_Baz (1:25 am): Shocking._

**Simon (1:26 am): your the only person i know who can text sarcasm**

**Simon (1:26 am): most people cant pull it off**

_Baz (1:26 am): I live to please._

**Simon (1:26 am): what i meant was that i dont understand how someone can have a magical soul**

_Baz (1:26 am): A core, Snow. It’s called a magickal core._

**Simon (1:29 am): shut up and try explaining instead of being a giant dick head**

Snow’s crude and brash, but he’s asking me about things I care about—a far cry from the man who left me in the airport, who’d halfway forgotten I could have interests independent of…well, him. I’m grateful that a blush cannot travel between mobiles.

_Baz (1:30 am): Well, most magickal physicians think that this is what separates us from Normals. I’ve been studying on a ward that focuses on violent spell damage and they do a lot of work mapping and repairing magickal cores—because that’s what’s usually damaged when spells go wrong._

**Simon (1:30 am): did i have one dya think?**

_Baz (1:30 am): Excuse me?_

**Simon (1:30 am): did i ever have a magickal soul or core or whatever**

**Simon (1:30 am): being normal and all**

**Simon (1:30 am): guess I couldnt of, hey?**

I don’t know how to answer that in the same way that I don’t have the words to tell him he’s the reason I wanted to learn about any of this to begin with.

That, as I ran my fingers along the warm red flesh of his wings, that I felt magick rippling beneath my skin. And that there must be something more to Simon than a magickal experiment gone wrong.

_Baz (1:31 am): I honestly don’t know, Simon._

He doesn’t reply for so long, I worry I’ve broken something. And then I remember we’re already broken.

**Simon (1:45 am) i like it**

**Simon (1:45 am): when you call me that**

**Simon (1:45 am): hang on**

**Simon (1:45 am): dissapearing again ofr a sec**

**Simon (1:46 am): just gotta deal with this fucking cop**

**Simon (1:46 am): be back in a bit**

_Baz (1:47 am): Excuse me, what?_

_Baz (1:47 am): Why are you interacting with police officers, Snow?_

_Baz (1:47 am): Are you in trouble?_

_Baz (1:48 am): Are you working?_

_Baz (1:48 am): Fuck you for dropping something like that and disappearing, you thoughtless dumpster fire of a man. You pustule of insensitivity. You blustering fucking buffoon._

_Baz (2:48 am): Goodnight_

_Baz (2:50 am): Simon_

**Simon**

I see the sirens first. Blue is blinking into white is blinking into blue. The cruiser isn’t far from the YRC, barely a few blocks into seedier territory.

I see Summer next. She’s popping in and out of focus against the flashing lights, her face slipping between two-o’clock-in-the-morning darkness and the sharp relief of sirens as they spin and spin and spin.

She’s screaming. I could hear it a block away, I can see it in the way her throat muscles flex. Her loose tank top is hanging off one shoulder, her dark hair matted.

“Are you the crisis worker?” the officer says, popping up beside my window and tapping his baton on the glass. A thick moustache crowds his upper lip and there’s lines between his brow (“ _They’re all frowny bastards,”_ Scott said, always). Cstbl. Munroe is spelled out in square letters across his chest.

“Hey,” I say, trying my best to keep my voice even. Not all cops are bad. “I’m Simon, the Mental Health Counsellor from YRC.”

_Nuanced thinking? Sweet Cersie, chosen one, I didn’t realize you could consider the world in anything more complex than black and white._

“Took you long enough,” Munroe says. “Don’t know why I’ve gotta wait for you to—”

“What’s going on with Summer,” I ask, cutting him off before he has the chance to be an arsehole. Not all cops are bad. Some of them try really hard. Some are just having a bad night—

“She went fucking nuts is what happened. What do you think I called you for? Emotional support?”

_You know what, Snow? A broken clock is right twice a day. I think we can safely assume that this constable is a hemorrhoid on the arse cheek of the universe._

I take a deep breath and try to smooth my angry feelings into something more diplomatic. Specific questions work best. Direct and to the point. “How long has she been here?”

“You mean outside of the 20 minutes I spent waiting for you?”

Okay, now he’s just being a fucking dick. YRC partnered with the local detachment a few months ago, where they gave us an emergency phone and we (being John and I) now alternate being on call. And when a youth in the area has a mental health crisis and the cops show up, they’re supposed to call us.

It had sounded bloody brilliant when John was pitching it. “ _So many of our fucking youth end up in lock up, beat to shit, and with fucking charges to boot. We can change all that, Simon. Don’t you want in on that?_ ”

John could make honey dew melon sound inspiring if he really put his mind to it. I’d bought in, hook, line, and sinker.

And where did it get me? Here, in front of this idiot, missing out of the few precious minutes I get with Baz.

_If you would like to strangle this man with his intestines, I would be amenable._

“Yeah,” I say, pushing the door open to draw myself level. “I need to know how long she’s been in distress.”

Munroe rolls his eyes. “She’s been squawking and beating her head off the wall for forty minutes or so. Neighbours called it in.”

“Right,” I say, striding past him towards Summer. I know her, I know that she picks the cheese off her cellophane-wrapped sandwiches. I know that she has a voice profile of a dozen abusive auditory hallucinations.

Munroe is talking behind me: “I don’t know what the fuck you’re supposed to do! I’m just gonna cuff her and bring her to the drunk tank. She can bang her head down there all night, for all I care…” but I’m not listening anymore.

“Summer,” I say before I get too close. Don’t wanna scare her.

“Need ‘em out. Need ‘em out.” She’s pacing.

“Summer, can you hear me?”

Those wild eyes follow my voice and wiggle over my face.

“Need ‘em out!” The muscles in her throat are so tight—chorded and writhing.

“See?” Murnoe says, stepping behind me. “This has gotta stop Steven. I’m taking—”

“NO! THEY’VE GOTTA STOP. I NEED ‘EM OUT!”

“Munroe,” I say, rounding on him for the half-second I’m willing to spare. “I want you to give me ten minutes to help Summer settle. If she’s still causing a disturbance by then, I’ll help you bring her to lock up myself. But for now, please just go away?”

To his—singular—credit, he does. Cursing me into the dirt the whole way back to his flashing cruiser, but he does.

I turn towards Summer.

“You know me. Even when they’re this loud, you still know me?”

The upward inflection gives her an out, if she wants it. “ _Establish trust_ ,” Scott had said. “ _Even the textbooks’ll tell ya that that’s what matters most. Therapeutic alliance or some shit_.”

Summer is still pacing, her throat still flexing a silent scream into the empty air, but I know she heard me, because she says, finally, “Yeah.”

“It’s Simon.”

“Simon,” she says, and I see the tear tracks down her dusty cheeks.

“So,” I say, stepping a little closer, and thank Merlin, she lets me. “Voices got out of their boxes again, hey?”

Because this is how Summer copes. I know this because I know her. Because I’ve sat with her when the voices aren’t so loud and I’ve listened to her when she tells me that she keeps them locked away. With combination locks and pad locks and safes with thick metal walls, underground, in a bunker. A whole world of security inside her head.

“They got out they’re out they’re gonna do bad things, Simon. They’re out and I don’t know what to do.”

I inch into her space.

“Hey, I’m gonna touch you now, okay?”

Her forearm fits between my thumb and finger.

“And now you and me,” I say, in the calmest, John-est voice I can muster, “are gonna start working them back into a place where they don’t wanna yell anymore.”

“ _Everyone’s gonna be different, Simon. Psychotic features hit people differently. And those folks who live their whole lives in a paranoid delusion or listening to a dozen voices screaming in their head? They figure out their own ways of coping. Some people bargain, some take meds, some like the company, and some organize their thoughts like a fucking drill sergeant._ ”

“ _But like_ ,” I’d said, “ _how do you figure it out? How can you know what each person needs, if they’re all gonna be different_?”

“ _Simple_ ,” John had said. “ _You ask_.”

It’s past three in the morning before the night’s finally done, but Summer’s settled on a mat at the YRC. Cheeks still stained with tears, nail marks from where she’d scratched her throat raw. She’ll be gone by morning. But for tonight, she’s safe.

**Simon (3:26 am): hey sorry**

**Simon (3:26 am): your probably asleep**

**Simon (3:35 am): yeah its super fucking late**

**Simon (3:35 am): fuck**

**Simon (3:36 am): i hate missing the chance to talk to you**

**Simon (3:41 am am): i know its stupid or dumb or whatever**

**Simon (3:41 am): and you can ignore this in the morning if you want**

**Simon (3:41 am): but this…these stupid messages in the middle of ht enight**

**Simon (3:41 am): i think there the best part of my day actually**

**Simon (3:42 am): and i just wanted…you to know that**

**Baz**

_You’re here,_ I think, _and you get to have this._

It’s the only positive affirmation I allow myself (normally, phrases like _seize the day_ or _live, laugh, breathe_ make me want to break things) (most positive affirmations ring hollow) (except for this one) (this one soothes).

_You’re here and you get to have this._

It’s amazing, really, the emotional legacy believing you were doomed to die in an inevitable battle to the death with the love of your life will leave behind.

_Hippocrates School of Medicine_. Europe’s preeminent magickal medical facility, where mages from across the continent (and sometimes across the ocean) come to study. We’re on the outskirts of the UCL campus, collaborate with their research facilities, somehow, without giving the nature of our magick away. The spellwork required to infiltrate so many Normal institutions leaves me grudgingly impressed.

_Yes, I get to have this_. This future I never thought I’d live to see. My story is multifaceted and divergent in a way that death upon the sword of the Chosen One could never be.

I look around the seminar room where we’ve gathered for Foundations of Magickal Theory and try to swallow the swell of past hurts and forgone conclusions that really weren’t as inevitable as they’d seemed at seventeen; instead, I focus on the voice of my instructor.

“You’ve obviously all done the prescribed readings for this week on the mapping of magickal cores, I take it?” Dr. Finnegan gives the room a perfunctory, if exasperated, look. A few of the students near the front laugh under their hands.

I’ve accepted that I’m never going to understand at least half of my classmates—how they could gain admission to the most sought after magickal medical school on this side of the Atlantic, and still not take their studies seriously is beyond me.

At least Bunce had given me a run for my money. That woman could give any of these troglodytes a lesson in diligence and, for a moment, I miss her more than I can bear.

“ _Kiss it better”_

_“Basil, that’s a family spell”_

_“Hush._ ”

I miss her like the air in my lungs.

“For the remainder of our class time, I’d like you to pair off with the person beside you—or your best friend across the room. I really don’t care about the interpersonal machinations going on here.”

More of those soft laughs, quiet confidences that I’ve always been on the outside of.

“Just find a partner and practice the initial step of magickal core mapping. I’ve outlined the instructions, which you wouldn’t need had you done the required reading.” His syllables sharpen playfully. “Once you’ve identified your partner’s aura, please record your notes and submit them for my consideration.”

Dr. Finnegan starts to wander the room, which has snapped into motion, scraping chairs, and chatter.

I’ve never appreciated this type of thing. Pair work. Ridiculous. If I could complete the rest of this program as independent study, that would be optimal—

“You mind working with me?”

I look up into a bashful face, softened by a light blush across his cheeks. Long-ish brown hair, a dusting of freckles. Not my usual type, but—

“If you don’t wanna, that’s okay. I can go or whatever…I mean…yeah.”

The bluster is much gentler than Snow’s, a summer drizzle rather than a hurricane, but I can’t help but see the same awkwardness fluttering in the blue eyes in front of me.

_Why am I so weak for blue eyes?_

“Alright. Why not?” I finally manage to say. “My name is—”

“Baz, yeah I know,” he says, and the blush deepens. “Uh, I mean, I’ve heard Dr. Finnegan say it enough.” He screws up his face into something that looks older and pinched and says, “ _Basilton, could you please explain to this gaggle of illiterates the importance of considering interveinal pressure when casting atmospheric magick?_ And then you just ramble off the answer like you’ve got an audiobook in your brain.”

I’m laughing and I can’t really believe it.

“Completing the assigned coursework does have its advantages,” I say, trying not to sound too pretentious. 

“Right,” he says, and his smile is gruff. (Not as gruff as Simon’s). “I’m Daniel, by the way.”

“Daniel,” I say, letting the two syllables roll off my tongue and then shaking off the urgent desire for someone. Someone Simon-like. Someone familiar. Nothing will ever be the same, but I wonder if I’d settle for something close. And then I slam the door on any of those types of thoughts. I spent enough time dating Snow lookalikes the first year after he left. It wasn’t enough then; it won’t be now. “Shall we get started?”

Daniel smiles up at me from under his lashes. “Yeah, um…sure…but I might need you to explain this,” he gestures at the white board at the front of the classroom, “to me.”

“One of those benefits I mentioned, of completing the assigned coursework,” I say, “is actually knowing what to do,” but there’s no venom in it.

“If you say so.” The blue-eyed idiot has the fucking audacity to _wink_ at me. With one of my more exaggerated eye rolls, I explain what Finnegan wants us to do.

“Magickal cores are tied to the essence of a mage. They are a part of who you are.”

“Okay,” Daniel says, nodding along as I speak. 

“The textbooks say that they look like a thousand threads, says that they twist and tangle, unravel now and then, take shape and reconnect.”

“Sounds pretty.”

“That’s one word for it,” I answer. “Whenever someone sustains significant spell damage, the injury is usually visible if you can examine the patient’s magickal core. With the right spell, we can see the threads, isolate the ones that have been impacted, and map a treatment plan.”

“Alright.” He’s listening, attention fixed on my face.

“But first, we need to do this.”

“This?” Daniel has dragged his chair closer. His knees are practically knocking into mine.

“There’s a reason they also call it your magickal spirit. The process is…” I swallow, trying to pretend that I can’t feel his eyes on me. “Intimate.”

Daniel licks his lips and I pretend not to notice. “Intimate how?”

“You need to know the person. Or try to. Bare minimum, you’ll need to know their magick. Which is what Dr. Finnegan wants us to do today.”

“Right!” Daniel says, cocking his head to the side like an especially inquisitive flamingo. “Magickal auras.”

“You need to get to know the way that your partner’s magick feels.”

Dr. Finnegan is walking around, clearly agitated that no one’s managed to cast the required spell yet. “Perhaps a demonstration?” I hear him say and _fuck._ I know where this is going—

“Basilton?”

“Oh shit,” Daniel says.

“Indeed.” I straighten my shoulders, using my posture to project confidence.

“Everyone, gather round. Watch Mr. Pitch take us through this just once before we all try in earnest.”

_I hate him. I fucking hate him._

Thirty bodies start to cluster, crowding around where my knees are touching Daniel’s. _He’s close. He’s too close_

“Palms up,” I say, once the chatter has settled. I can feel thirty eyes all over me, and I try to push the apprehension away.

Daniel doesn’t speak, just complies.

The classroom is silent. The phrase “you could hear a pin drop” suddenly seems very apt.

“I’m going to touch you now,” I say, retracing the steps in my head, going over the chapter I’d scoured the previous night.

Daniel swallows, and I watch it all the way down his neck. _Nervous._ When I place the tips of my fingers in his palms, they’re clammy.

“Bring a bit of your magick to the surface,” I say, finding his eyes, looking for understanding in the blue.

“How do you mean?” His voice is uneven. _So nervous._

“Light a match inside your heart,” I say, feeling the familiar mantra slip through my lips. “And blow on the tinder. You don’t need to use it. Just let it settle.”

“Okay,” he whispers.

“It’ll feel a little like holding your breath.”

“Okay.”

I feel his magick start to thrum, feel the room heat up (or is that just me?), and I cast.

**_“Listen to your heart.”_ **

“That’s the spell you’ll need,” Dr. Finnegan whispers from behind me. _I don’t know why they’re whispering._

“Hold it as long as you can for me,” I say, and Daniel nods, the effort of keeping his magick under his skin showing in the sweat on his brow.

“For some people,” I say, more to myself than anyone else, “you won’t need the spell. For some people, you can feel the essence of their magick just by looking at them. By seeing them worked up.” With his arm pinning me against a wall. Standing down a parade of monsters and refusing to break. Kissing and kissing when the world is on fire. “For some people, you can almost taste it.” _Smoky. Sticky. Like green wood in a campfire. Simon._

The effects of my spell are starting to take hold, to slip into the threads of Daniel’s magick and amplify, make them bigger and brighter and stronger. I smell sandalwood and the sharp scent of crab-apple. I see a mist creeping around him like incense burning in a breathless room, see something playful dancing in the air, like light one lake. It’s jubilant and dainty and—

“Beautiful,” someone breathes into the silence.

“Magick usually is,” I murmur, and let the threads come undone.

Forty minutes later, after many fervent attempts at **_Listen to your heart_** , the air is still buzzing. For the first time in forever, I feel calm, feel safe in the caress of a thousand magickal threads.

“That was nice,” Daniel says and it takes me a minute to answer.

“Yes,” is all I can manage.

But he blusters through my monosyllables. “Thanks. For the help. I would’ve been screwed.”

“Probably.” Sometimes, I don’t want to be nice. Sometimes, I just want to let the sharp edges of my words loose on the world and tell everyone who takes offense to find someone else to talk to.

His laughter rumbles, like thunder. “Feel like helping me practice some time?”

The magick in the air still has me, so warm and soft and good. “Maybe,” I mumble, but I’m not really here. I’m composing a thousand messages, planning how I’m going to explain this day to Simon.

_You’re not going to believe what happened…_

**Simon**

**you wont beleive what happened**

My fingers are possessed. The ends of my digits itch to text him. Stupid shit (in my kitchen), like how my cereal was stale this morning and isn’t that a stupid thing to get you down and yet here we are?

More important shit (on the bus) like how it’s been two weeks since I yelled at John for no reason apart from the fact that I’m a kraken.

And surprising things, like how I’d walked into the office this morning and John had thrown a cinnamon bun at my face and said “so, are you done being weird about it?” And how I’d nodded and the world settled again and the fucker just forgave me. Just like that.

To keep my restless texting urges in check, I’ve started a note in my phone, where I write the things that I want to tell Baz and save them for later. For the hours when he can forgive me too.

The winter winds are chapping my cheeks as I stand outside South Sherbrook Fitness, while John rings the intercom and a dozen participants stand in wait. Today is one of our monthly Recreation Days. “ _Physical health is not divorced from mental health, Simon. Look it up_ ,” John had insisted when he thrust a stack of flyers against my chest six months ago and ordered me to make myself useful and staple them around the neighbourhood.

My fingers punch the detail of my day into digital storage as I try to pretend that I’m not freezing my balls off.

**you wont believe what happened. I’m about to go play basketball. Ive never played basketball baz. its gonna be a disaster. why am i doing this stupid thing, you aks? Its a long story but the short version is that johns an aresehole**

“What the fuck’s the hold up!” Frank shouts from the huddle of bodies standing behind us, pressed together for warmth. Winter’s here early, and for our participants (most of whom live outside), this has consequences more serious than runny noses and ice on the windshield.

Kate’s on a desperate PR campaign for used coats and, if things don’t pick up, will likely end with a visit to the thrift store armed with a wad of twenties collected from staff.

“Hello, South Sherbrook Fitness.”

“It’s John. We’ve got a twelve o’clock booking.”

“You’re the group from YRC?”

“That’s us.” John’s voice is always cheery—a fucking holiday carol distilled.

“Come on in!”

“Bout fucking time!” Quinton shouts. “I’m freezing my dick off.”

“Shut up, all of you,” John says as a buzzer sounds and the internal locking mechanism comes undone. “I want you all to go get changed if you’ve got gym clothes. Meet me on the courts in ten minutes.”

The huddle stampedes towards the warmth of an open door.

“And no hot boxing the toilets!” John shouts after them.

All things considered, basketball could’ve been worse. John is, predictably, a wizard with the ball, spinning and moving the thing between his legs. I hate him. The aresehole also insists on passing me the ball all the time, barking orders like, “Move your feet, Simon,” or “Get your hands up,” or “You’re a muscly bloke. Fucking use it!”

The youth aren’t half as nice. Haley, a fifteen-year-old sleeping on whatever couch will take her, is a bumblebee on speed—she buzzes up and down the court and has a perfect fucking shot. Face flushed after a breakaway lay-up, she flashed her crooked teeth at me and declared, “Your ball handling is shit, Simon.”

My shooting isn’t quite so bad, but Quinton barked criticisms anyway. “Control your fucking elbow!” or “You gotta use your legs, Simon. For fucks sake!”

Still, by the end of the hour, everyone is grinning like I haven’t seen in months, covered in sweat, and well pleased about it.

John slips the friendly voice from the intercom (the name tag on her chest says that she’s Jenny, the Recreation Coordinator) three twenty-pound notes.

“You can’t go back into the gym. Got another booking in 15 minutes,” she says, leaning against the wall, her straight-edged fringe very serious.

John gives her the smile that he saves for special occasions. The one that turns knees to butter. I’ve seen it on his face more than once and tried to practice it in the bathroom mirror (to poor effect).

“Totally fair Jen,” he says, leaning in a little. “But you don’t mind if we freshen up a bit?”

Jenny rolls her eyes. “Last time, I got in shit from my boss cause your little idiots hotboxed the—”

“I promise,” John says, elevating the grin from knee-melting to a fucking smoulder. “That won’t happen again.”

Everyone is holding their breath.

A shower is a precious thing. A shower scrubs the street off your skin. It is a steady stream of warmth and fresh smells. It can make you feel human. YRC doesn’t have a shower room (John’s got three funding applications in, but those take time). And a lot of the shelters around the city that actually _have_ showers are sketchy to the point of dangerous—not a place we recommend our youth get naked.

Half the reason John pitched this programming was for the cheap showers.

Jenny rolls her eyes and gestures to the staircase. “Showers are open downstairs,” she says to immediate shouts of pleasure.

“Slow down, you animals!” John hollers, but it’s a lost cause and he knows it.

“This was good,” I say, as he shoulders up beside me.

“Jesus Simon, if those are your skills on a good day, you’re gonna need some remedial lessons.”

“Fuck off,” I say with a smile.

“Wanna wait until the hyenas have left the building before we shower?”

If we weren’t going back to work for three hours, I’d have skipped it altogether, but the idea of pulling jeans onto my sweaty legs makes me shudder. “Definitely.” 

…

I should’ve known. Should’ve thought. Should’ve anticipated that this would happen.

But I didn’t. Because I’m stupid. Because I don’t think.

The steam is thick in the air as we wander down to the showers—so thick, it’s hard to see. “They really enjoyed this for all it’s worth, ‘eh?”

John nods. “They always do.”

There’s a softness to his voice, a fondness, that makes me feel safe. Because, if there are people like John in roles like this, then the world might get better.

We’re standing in front of the lockers, peeling off our sweat-soaked kit, and I don’t think. I just don’t think.

My back is bare and turned away from him, when I hear—

“Simon.” It’s a gasp. And I know. Fuck, I know the question that’s coming and I don’t…I can’t…

“Simon,” he tries again. “Your scars. Where did you…how did you get…what happened to you?”

I know what he’s seeing. Even through the steam and the haze, even if he weren’t trying to see, I know that you can’t miss the massacre written across my back.

Skin, thick with scar tissue. Angry and chorded, some of it raised and bulbous. My back is lava turned to stone. My shoulders are alive with grotesque purples and whites, reds and pinks, uneven and angry looking. There’s an ocean of pain, a roiling tableau of shame and one catastrophic unforced error.

“Please,” I try to whisper, but my voice is lost in the flashback barrelling towards me with breathtaking speed.

And then his fingers are brushing against me and the world is upside-down.

_“I don’t think this is a good idea, Simon,” Dr. Wellbelove says, kind brown eyes (whole and unbroken) looking down into mine (red rimmed and purple)._

_“Sir, I…I need them gone. I need them…I can’t…”_

_He tries to pat me on the shoulder, but I flinch from the touch. Pain streaks across his face, and for a moment, we match._

_“Alright,” he says, after what feels like forever. “I can’t do it. There’s too much we don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like…well, you. But I know someone who might be willing. I’ll…” He swallows and find his voice. “I’ll put you in touch.”_

“Simon, can you hear me?”

I can see lockers and showerheads. I can taste moisture on my tongue. _Ground yourself, Simon._ _Hold on to here. Now. They’re just flashbacks. They can’t hurt you_.

But I can’t. They won’t stop.

_“I’m not sure what Wellbelove was worried about,” Dr. Kravinov says. “Not to speak ill of a colleague. Nothing like that_.” I should’ve known _. “But this is a standard amputation. At the end of the day, while they may have magickal origins,” he says, flicking my wingtip. The pain reverberates through the red flesh and I feel my first twinge of apprehension. But not enough. “General anesthetic and it should go off without a hitch.”_

_The relief is a drug. I chase it._

I’m rubbing my calves. Focusing on parts of me that are real. That are here.

“I’m sorry, Simon. I’m so sorry.”

My back sliding down the lockers. Hard tile. John’s face, swimming in and out.

_Starch sheets, a thin metal bed, shelves and monitors and machines that beep. “Are you ready Simon?” It’s Dr. Kravinov, his mask obscuring his square jaw. I can still see the edges of his spray tan, disappearing near his surgical cap._

_“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”_

_I think they push the anesthesia into an IV. And then I don’t think anymore…_

_…Until my back cracks wide open. I’m going off. That’s the only explanation. Except going off never hurt like this._

_Someone’s screaming._

_“Too much blood—”_

_“This wasn’t supposed to happen—”_

_The pain is pure fire, burning under my skin, so thick that and awake and it’s touching me everywhere._

_“Why are they moving!?”_

_“Normal pressure isn’t enough to cut—”_

_Someone is fucking screaming, and I wish they’d stop._

_I lurch up and realize that I’m still in the operating room. That the screens are still pointed at me, that the lights are still bright, the beeps are screaming. Is that whose screaming?_

_“Simon!”_

_“Put him under.”_

_I heave and vomit up spit and bile onto my hospital gown._

_“That would be exceeding safe medical dosage.”_

_“Too much blood.”_

_I see one of my wings, limp on the floor._

_There’s blood. So much blood._

_I hear a thrashing sound, a torn sail, wet paper tearing. There’s blood spatter everywhere._

_And they’re still screaming._

_“Hold it down.”_

_“Secure it to the bed.”_

_“Sedate the fucking patient.”_

_I feel like someone’s got their hands buried in my spine, fingers squeezing, squirming and tearing apart the threads that keep me done up and whole._

_And that’s when I see it, reflected in a mirror, one of my wings. The angle’s all wrong. The membrane is torn. It’s moving, crooked and broken. Like me. It’s moving and it’s a part of me and the wrongness of it sends me retching again and—_

_“SEDATE HIM NOW.”_

_As the drugs rush into my bloodstream, I realize that the screaming, that awful screaming, is me. It’s coming from me._

Tile floor. Steam, that should be hot, but I’m shaking. So cold, I feel like I’ll never be warm again. There’s a face, stupidly handsome…

“John?”

His relief is a physical thing. “Yeah, Simon. It’s me.”

I blink. Try to keep myself here. Hands on my thighs. Bite my cheek. Try to focus on the way the tiles feel against my legs, the lockers against my bare back—

“Fuck.” He saw. He saw he saw he saw.

“Hey. Keep up the grounding and listen to me Simon.” He waits for me to nod. And I do.

“You’re going to stay exactly where you are. And then we’re gonna get you dressed and into a car. And then I’m taking you home. Do you understand?”

“Who’s car?”

“Doesn’t matter. And Simon?” His eyes are doing that intense thing, when he’s scared but doesn’t want to show it. “We don’t have to talk about it. Not today, okay?”

The lump in my throat feels like the whole world. I can’t speak, so I nod.

I don’t remember much else. I must’ve got dressed. Must’ve driven across town. I remember John thanking Jenny for something, and taking a set of keys. I don’t remember how I got to my room, but I do remember John sitting next to me on my bed, telling me that it doesn’t matter when or why, “but if you ever need me, you’d better get your stubborn arse to my house, or I’ll fucking lose it, Simon.”

I think I nodded. Or growled an affirmation.

“Do you need anything?” he asks as he rises.

“Program an alarm into my phone. For 1 am.”

“Why—”

“Please.” My voice is hoarse and not up for questions.

Giving me that same fucking look, the intensity stripping me bare, he picks up my phone. “Alarm’s set. I’ve programmed my address into you contact information. And don’t show up for work tomorrow, Simon, I swear to Christ.” And then he leaves. I don’t remember when. I don’t remember seeing him go.

**Baz**

The hum of my mobile sends a thrill of anticipation up my arm.

**Simon (1:02 am): hey**

_Baz (1:03 am): Such scintillating conversation, Snow. I see you’re still a man of monosyllables._

**Simon (1:03 am): guess so**

Something feels wrong.

_Baz (1:03 am): Are you alright?_

**Simon (1:03 am): fine**

I have to tamp down the urge to tear my phone in half. This is Simon when he’s closed up. When he’s sitting on the couch, fucking catatonic. Simon when he doesn’t feel me squeezing his hand. When he rolls away from me in the middle of the night. This is the textual version of that.

And I’m so fucking tired of it.

Except…

Well, except he texted first. Which, for Simon, is an important difference.

_Baz (1:04 am): You’re not fine and I’m not stupid. What do you need?_

Simon types for a long time. The text I eventually get, though, is short and hits like bullets. 

**Simon (1:06 am): you**

**Simon (1:06 am): this. just this. its enough**

But suddenly, I realize that it’s not enough. Not for me.

_Outgoing call, Baz Pitch to Simon Snow (1:06 am)_

“‘Lo?”

That voice. It’s thick with emotion and strained—like all its edges have been picked apart. Three years hasn’t dampened what it does to me. Maybe this was a bad idea.

“Snow?”

“Uh.” He was definitely not expecting this. “I wasn’t really expecting—”

“Well, your texts were an obvious cry for help.” I can handle this.

“Obvious, was I?”

“To me.” _Fuck, reign in your feelings. You’re a Pitch_.

I can feel that edge, that thousand-foot drop that is at the end of everything I do with Simon Snow. I can feel my feet inching closer to the point of no return. To that place where I jump and hope that we can fly.

“Thanks,” he finally says.

“It’s a phone call, Snow, not a rescue mission.” I can handle this. I’m the epitome of composed and chill—

“You’re still so neurotic,” he says, and the words come on the crest of an exhale. “And such a drama queen.”

“If this is how you treat your late-night texting companions, I shudder to think how you treat your friends.”

“Not so good, lately, if we’re being honest.”

I want to say, _That you have any friends at all is a modern miracle Snow. Would you like me to register this with the Vatican?_ I would’ve said that, years ago, when we started all of this. But our texting has been instructive—has me in the habit of taking an extra second to consider if my words are too harsh. And so, instead, I say, “You should explain, Snow. If you want to.”

And, somehow, miraculously, he does.

“It’s fucking John. I don’t even know where to start with him. I suppose…” He trails into thoughtfulness, and I wait. With bated breath. For Simon to share a piece of himself with me. For the first time since…it is telling, I suppose, that I can’t remember. “You have time for this?” he says, his words suddenly bashful, as if he’s realized he overexposed and is desperate for an excuse to backtrack.

This is a conversation filled with ledges.

“I have time.”

“Well, I suppose it starts with a fucking cinnamon bun.”

I learn about John, colleague and friend and perhaps the biggest reason Simon decided to pursue social work. The person who got to share all of those milestones with him, who gets to see him every day, who he clearly cares about and—

“Thought he was making a pass at me once,” Simon says, and I try to control the titan of jealousy rising like the second coming of Christ “And I kinda teased him about it. And then I learned that he was super into women and not remotely interested. Kinda hurt my ego, not gonna lie.”

“How tragic,” I manage to choke out.

“Seriously though, Baz. I don’t mean to generalize or whatever, but no dude should dress that well and smell that fucking good and be that straight.”

“Snow,” I say, and it’s an effort to keep my voice serious. “You’re queer. You. Who thinks that bar soap is appropriate for washing your hair.”

“That was **one** time!”

“Still.” This John must be the criminally handsome dark-haired man in so many of Snow’s photos. It’s a relief to realize they were never an item. I’d spent more than one night, thumbing through Instagram, wondering.

“It’d be nicer if your memory wasn’t so photographic.”

“We all have our crosses to bear.”

“Fuck off, Baz.” His voice is still thick with exhaustion, but there’s less sadness in it.

It’s so nice just to talk to him. For a minute, I just sit in it. In this tiny connection forged in the middle of the night.

When the laws governing the world, the ones we’re used to, no longer apply

Snow must be thinking about it too. “Your mum was right, you know,” he says, and I hadn’t thought my chest could get any tighter. “These hours. When the rest of the world’s gone to bed. They’re…like magick.”

“Of course she was right,” I say, drowning in how nice it all is. Choking on it. “She was my mother.”

It’s impossible, but I can hear him smiling.

“I wanna see the stars,” he says, soft into the receiver. I hear the sound of bedsprings releasing, of a duvet shuffling, and I know he’s gotten up.

I match him, pushing off the couch cushions and wandering towards the balcony. A view of the night sky sounds just right, somehow.

“What are you wearing, anyway?” he asks after a moment.

“How suggestive,” I say and, fuck it, it’s past one o’clock and I’m feeling reckless and high on the sound of his voice mingling with mine. “Are you trying to flirt with me?”

“What! No!” he says, far too quickly. I hear him blubber into the phone and breathe a sigh of relief.

Wild exclamations are a step closer to the normal Simon—a Simon who’s not on the verge of tears after a day he won’t talk about.

All bluster. A hurricane, not a summer drizzle.

“No. I…” I hear him swallow, close my eyes, picture the bob of his Adam’s apple. “I’m just. I’m trying to picture it.”

“Still a bit suggestive, Snow.”

“Fuck off and play along.” The time of night’s made him bold too.

“Alright. I’m not wearing socks.”

“No fucking way! You’re always in socks. You wear socks to bed!”

I try to ignore the pang of familiarity, this little ghost of intimacy. I look down at my bare feet. “Believe it. The snow made them soggy and I didn’t have the energy to fetch a new pair from my bedroom.”

“I’m barefoot too.”

“Well yes. You’re a neanderthal with no appreciation for the finer things in life. Sockless is a state of mind for you.”

“How are you always such a dick?”

I sigh, letting my eyes drift over the view from my balcony. “Years and years of practice.”

I can hear the traffic through the thick glass doors.

“I’m still in my work clothes. Didn’t change after…couldn’t really…it all just…” The words dissolve into nonsense, and I let him work through it. Let the silence stand until he can pull himself back together. “I just woke up, if I’m being honest.”

There’s something there. A loose thread that I could pull, that he’s put out there, for me to look at.

“Do you want to tell me?”

“I…” I can taste the static. “I don’t know. I’m…I’m scared Baz.”

The honesty is unvarnished; this is as raw as I’ve ever heard him.

“That’s alright, Snow.”

“I…I can…”

“Simon,” I say, and his first name on my lips sends the line into silence. “I’m not here to pry. Just tell me what you need.” It’s enough. He tried, and for now, that’s enough.

“Your voice.”

A conversation made of ledges. I can’t walk anywhere without falling off.

“You.”

I scramble for sentences. For distraction. For something less intense than the attention of Simon Snow.

“My day was actually incredibly interesting. That should come as no surprise. I’m a very interesting person.”

I hear him snort and take it as a personal victory. _Come back to the world, Simon. Shake off the weight of this day and come back to me._

“I’m going to tell you about magickal cores now, Simon. About revealing a mages aura so that a physician can map the threads more easily. And you are going to be polite and listen.”

“That won’t be a problem.”

“Are you quite certain? Because you’re not known for the length of your attention span.”

“Baz. Just tell me.”

And so I do.

Once I start, I can’t stop. Speaking with Snow is like breathing, and how did I live for three years without air?

The night wears thin, and I picture it. A split screen, with two lives on either side. One golden-haired disaster standing in front of a window, staring up into the night. One dark-haired vampire, looking through glass doors at the same sky, imagining that, if things had been different, these two images could fade into one another—a trick of the light, the magick of these forgotten hours making everything alright.

There’s snow floating on the air.

Prescient.

Inevitable.

There’s magick moving between the lines. Between hands pressed to plastic, pressed to cheeks. I wonder if he feels it too.

**Simon**

There’s magick in the sound of his voice and the glimpse at the life I might’ve had if I’d done things differently. If I’d done things right. I wonder if he feels it too.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Impromptu parties, unexpected dates, and drafts, no longer unsent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two more chapters, friends! I cannot fucking wait!

**Baz**

When I’d initially agreed to lunch, I hadn’t counted on an ambush. Dev and Niall have grown sneakier in their old age, and more determined to meddle in my personal affairs. As a united front, they’re especially brazen, ruthless in their commitment my welfare.

“We’re throwing you a party,” Niall announces, once I have a latte in front of me and a soup and sandwich combo on the way.

And I’m throwing them out. Or showing myself out. I’m not really sure the etiquette for public spaces and kicking obnoxious friends to the curb. I won’t engage in this madness.

“Will it just be you two in attendance?” I hear myself say and, fuck, my vanity really needs to be put in check.

“Hey!” Dev’s says, and he sounds genuinely offended. “We count as a party!”

“You really do not,” I say, and Dev flicks my forehead.

““What’s the occasion?” I ask.

“See, we thought about that,” Niall says, the voice of reason behind every one of Dev’s bad decisions (because this idea has Dev’s grubby fingers all over it). “Birthday is too far off.”

“Just wanna point out that February is a shit month to have a birthday. Seriously. What were they thinking?”

“If by _they_ you mean my dead mother and emotionally stunted father, and by _what_ you mean sex,” I watch Dev’s face go a delightful shade of pink, “then I’d say they weren’t really plotting optimal birth months.”

“Jesus dude, retract the claws.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Anyways!” Niall says, barging back into the conversation. “Your birthday’s too far and there are no real holidays to speak of until Christmas.”

“November’s a pretty shit month too, as it turns out,” Dev adds.

“So, we’ve decided it’s a Just Because party—”

“—What Niall means to say is that it’s more a—”

“—Dev, shut up, we agreed not to say—”

“—it’s more a Your Ex Is Harassing You and You’re Too Much of a Masochist to Do Anything About It party.”

I choke on my coffee. “Crowley,” I mumble around the rim of my mug. “Dev, you could work on your subtlety.”

“That’s what I said!” Niall half shouts, and all of a sudden, we’re the centre of attention in the crowded diner.

I roll my eyes. “I do not need a Make Me Feel Better About Snow party,” I say, fixing both of them with my best glare.

“Oh, fuck off with the brooding vampire nonsense,” Dev says, punching me (playfully?) in the shoulder.

“I prefer aloof recluse, with a dash of bookish and more rakish good looks than I know what to do with.”

“Yeah, well you’ve always been a bit full of yourself,” Dev replies. “And you might’ve tricked _yourself_ into some weird delusion that everything’s alright. But I was there Baz.” Dev has stopped smiling. “I remember.”

“Yes, well,” I try for another swallow of my latte and miss. “I don’t need you two fussing over me.”

Niall hands me a napkin, and I cannot abide the pity that’s in his eyes.

“You do, actually,” Dev says. “Nothing good comes where Snow’s concerned.”

I’m about to protest, but Dev mouths Soup Ladle at me, and I’m stopped dead in my tracks.

“Right!” Niall is not letting his good mood go softly into the night. “So, this Celebration That Shall Not Be Named—”

“—thank you Niall—” I say, at the same time as Dev says,“—we could call it a Snow Sucks party and just be obvious about it—”

Niall marches on, unbothered by our commentary, “—Will be taking place at the King’s Head on Friday. And you will both be in attendance. And you, Baz, are encouraged,” Niall stops speaking to fix me with a stern look, “to invite friends. You know what those are, don’t you?”

“I thought you were supposed to be the good cop in this scenario!” I say, mock offended (if a little stung). “I have friends!”

“Oh yeah? Name one!” Dev juts out his chin in a way that is too Snow-like for comfort. “And your aunt doesn’t count.”

“Why not?” I ask, and then immediately regret it. Fiona will crucify me if she ever hears me calling her a _friend_.

“Cause she’s already invited,” Dev says, and then fucking winks at me.

“Your crush on my aunt is creepy at best and incestuous at worst.”

“We’re not related!”

“By blood!”

“You two really need to stop—” Niall tries.

“Quit stalling, Baz. Name one friend.” Dev looks at me like he’s put my king in check.

“Well,” I say, not-stalling, turning my brain inside out for someone who could pass as a friend.

“See—”

“Daniel!” I blurt, a bit unsettled by how difficult that was. After escaping this horrific lunch date, I mentally remind myself to reconsider my social efforts at uni.

“Who’s Daniel?”

“A classmate,” I say, intentionally light on details—mostly because I don’t have many.

“A classmate?” Dev asks, his eyebrows waggling at me.

“Yes, Devereaux,” I say, trying not to scowl. “You remember those, don’t you?”

“Guess you’ll have to bring him then, won’t you?” Dev’s smirking at me and I hate it.

“I guess I will,” I shoot back with as much dignity as I can muster before I realize I’ve lost something.

“Oh look!” Niall says, scenting danger. “Our lunch!”

And for the rest of the afternoon, our food placates the simmering frustrations (Dev) and the unsaid insults (me). Politeness holds all the way to the door, as Dev pushing it open and the winter air comes rushing in.

“I’ve said it before Baz,” Dev whispers as I pass through, all seriousness and certainty. “You deserve better than this.” I hear him gather the air into his chest. “You deserve more than what he’s got left after the world’s taken a bite. More than what’s left when he’s done.”

“I…” I’m stunned, the memory of those words a blunt object. “I know.”

**Simon**

The smell of fresh coffee tickles my nostrils, a sharp shock of hot against the frosty November air. The mats are packed tight in the main hall, bodies huddled against the cold. The sight of it— of these first few weeks after the winter chill starts to bite—squeezes the chambers of my heart. Life in care had never been a cake walk, but this—I’d never had to live like this.

A bit of coffee slops down the side of the takeaway cup. I don’t look up as I enter the office—I know it’ll be just the two of us, I know there are things I need to say.

“I thought I told you to stay home today.” John’s got his ankles crossed, tapping progress notes into our documentation system.

He had. Had been pretty fucking stern about it, actually. I’d thought about this inevitable conversation on the bus ride over, about lying and saying I hadn’t remembered. But lying to John was pointless—he always knew.

“It’s my clinical day,” I say instead, and it’s mostly honest. “I’ve got counselling sessions booked solid and I’m not gonna bail on participants cause I had a bad day.”

John lifts his fingers from the ancient keyboard and turns to look at me. His eyes, the way he’s staring right through me, makes me want to flee—run as fast as I can away from someone who seems to care.

“You can’t pour from an empty glass,” he says, so serious it aches.

“I’ll schedule some time off,” I say, and I mean it.

“When?”

“Soon,” I say. It’s noncommittal. I have no idea when I could take the time or what I would do with it. I remember those first few weeks after America and the airport, listless in the flat, Penny poking and prodding and eventually just hovering from a distance. I remember what it was like to feel trapped and so restless you wanted to fucking explode.

And I know that’s what time off would be like for me right now and I have no interest in going back there. Work, for better or worse, keeps me grounded. It gives me purpose. Structures my day.

“Soon?” John says, and it’s a question because he doesn’t believe me.

“Soon,” I say again. I want to mean it.

“Okay.” And that’s how John leaves it.

I don’t deserve him.

I peel off my brown leather jacket and toss it onto the rack. “I see you still got me a cinnamon bun,” I say, glancing at the paper bag beside his computer tower.

“Well, yes. I know you better than you know yourself.” He picks it up and pushes it towards my monitor.

Another long pause. Those thick eyebrows are giving me their I-can-wait-all-day-for-you-to-address-the-elephant-in-the-room look. Fucking eyebrows.

One of the wheels on my chair is broken—it scrapes the concrete floor every time I fall into it, screeches bloody murder if I try to wheel about. This morning, as I flop into the worn fake leather, it’s the loudest thing in the room. “I know we should talk about it” I say, picking at my danish. “I know that.”

John doesn’t say anything.

“I know…” I take a deep breath. John deserves a few words, and so I dredge up my courage and start to bluster. “You think I studied to be a counsellor, read all those books about mental health and different symptoms and diagnoses…”

I trail off, pray for an interruption, but John remains, resolutely, silent.

I try again. “You think I could read about…uh…” My chest is rising and falling, air wheezing in and out. I will not have a panic attack. Not right now _._ “About PTSD and not…not know what was going on?” There. I’d said it. Out loud.

_You gave it a name and the world didn’t end, Snow. Perhaps you should try this more often._

John’s still sitting in his wheely chair, sipping his coffee, lips pressed together.

“I know. I…” My breathing is a ragged thing. “I know. And I’m gonna do something about it. I swear I am.”

“When?”

“Soon.” Fuck.

“Soon?”

“Soon.”

“Okay.”

Has the office always been this small? Has my chest always been the size of a match box?

“Can we maybe jump to the part where you start asking me about stupid shit again? Or making jokes at my expense?” I finally say.

John is happy to oblige.

“Who’d you call at 1am?”

I should know better by now than to think I’d ever get off easy with John. There are no easy questions today.

“Do you really need to ask?”

“No,” he says, huffing out a smile. “But I’d rather hear you cop to it.”

Of course he would. “Baz. I was talking to Baz.” And I can’t stop thinking about it.

“No matter how many times you bring him up, I never get used to how weird his name is.”

The snort that bursts from my lips is an ugly little thing, but I can’t help it. “Would you believe me if I told you that wasn’t even his first name?”

_Snow, if you reveal my name to this hopelessly hetero nitwit, I will sand off your toe nails._

“His first name can’t possibly be worse. Why would he ever choose a name like Baz?”

“Because his first name is Tyrannus?”

_I’m going to skin you alive. I’m going to wrap your tonsils around your neck and make you sing._

“You’re full of shit. Cold fucking dog shit.”

It feels good to smile. “Not about this.”

“Were his parents sociopaths?” John asks, and he’s finally smiling too. “Or hippies?”

“Worse,” I say, my voice dropping, in a mock effort at gravitas. “They were hideously posh.”

“That explains it,” John says, turning back to his computer and taking a long draught of coffee.

“You can never tell him I told you.”

“You think there’s a universe where I’m friendly enough with your giant trigger of an ex that I’d ever be able to tell him I know his posh first name?”

I shrug. “Just covering my bases.”

“God, he must be fit.”

“Why’s that?”

“To make up for that name! Can you imagine having to squeak out three syllables while you’re fucking?”

“Stop!” My voice has risen at least two octaves.

“Oh, Tyrannus. Oh!”

“I hate you.”

John has an invisible partner bent over his desk and is miming an enthusiastic fuck when Caryn wanders in from the cold.

“What in god’s name are you doing?”

“He’s demonstrating,” I say, trying to hide my face in my palms. “Please make him stop.”

**Baz**

_Degrees. He’d wanted to meet at Degrees. Why would anyone want to meet at their seedy university pub to study?_

As I wander inside, my judgemental looks really cannot be helped. The whole place is hopelessly hipster, in a way that’s trying way too hard to look like it’s not trying too hard.

Arcade Fire is humming over the speaker system and there’s a dozen photos of animals wearing black rimmed glasses.

_I need to get out of here. Right now—_

“Baz! Baz over here!”

I look up, searching for dark brown hair and bright blue eyes, trying to follow the sound of his voice—

“Baz!”

There, near the bar. Daniel’s standing next to an empty table, waggling his arms and it’s so earnest, it makes me cringe; I can feel his enthusiasm from here.

There’s no use denying that he’s fit, though. For the first time in months, I make an effort to notice someone, let my eyes track their way up his long legs, notice how his dark jeans hug his thighs, appreciate how his long sleeve is pushed up past his elbows, how the top two buttons are undone. How he’s…wearing an apron?

Nope. That’s not doing it for me.

“Sorry,” he says, his eyes darting away from mine. “I picked up a shift.”

“You work here?”

“Yup. It’s not a bad gig, as part time jobs go. Good tips, right on campus.”

“Of course. You could have cancelled you know?” I wouldn’t have minded. Would’ve saved me from what promised to be an intensely awkward encounter.

“Well, see…” He’s fumbling his words again, his gentle bluster rising in his cheeks. “I didn’t want to miss this. I was looking forward to it.”

_Crowley. What have I gotten myself into?_

“Looking forward to Foundations of Magickal Theory? I’ve always found conversations about Flammelian alchemy and stabilizing magickal alloys especially droll. The banter is just so stimulating.”

“I guess,” he says, cracking his knuckles against his thigh. Probably a nervous tick. Simon had those too. “Mostly getting to hang out with you though.”

I have no idea how to respond to that, so I don’t. Instead, I set my bag on an empty chair, slide into the seat across from Daniel, and start to unpack my books.

“D’ya want a drink?” he asks, elbows on the table, searching my face for something.

“Why not?” I say, trying to control the wave of anxiety rising in my chest. Did I agree…had I agreed to a date?

No. This was a study session between two young single men.

_A study date._

“What can I get you?”

_Where he’s offering to buy me a drink and telling me all about how he didn’t want to miss the chance to hang out with me. Yes, that doesn’t sound like a date at all._

I’m so categorically fucked.

Daniel is looking at me, his face stuck somewhere between awkward and embarrassed.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“I asked, what can I get you. To drink?”

“Oh,” I choke. “I’ll have the house red.”

“Should’ve known.”

“Excuse me?”

“You look like the type who sucks back fancy wine.” Does he think he’s flirting? Have I not flirted for so long that I’ve forgotten what it looks like in the wild?

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Sure, you don’t,” he says, sauntering back the bar.

I had every intention of shutting this not-a-date down. Or showing this ridiculous Daniel (horrible name, really) that this was nothing more than a scholastic appointment.

But then he returned with a perfectly acceptable glass of wine. “Hope that’s fancy enough for you.”

“Dishwater.”

“Git.”

And then he had the audacity to open up his notebook and just look so keen as I prattled on about the different healing spells you could use to restore a damaged core.

“It’s a lot like darning socks, really. Have you ever darned socks?”

Not to mention how _nice_ he was. Unobtrusive. Easy going. Just easy in general. Easy to be around, easy to talk to, easy to please.

Minimal bluster to speak of.

No fighting or plotting, no death threats or swords, no dark looks and unread messages.

There’s a book in my hand, notes scattered across the table, soft music humming away—the pretentious sort by an artist no one knows the name of and that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?

It’s just so easy.

I hear the sound of a camera shutter and look up into the back of his mobile, pointed at me from across the table.

My face must ask the question.

Daniel’s sitting in his chair, shoes off, legs crossed, a goofy grin on his face. “You uh…well you looked pretty cute.”

_Aleister fucking Crowley. I have to ask him to come to Dev and Niall’s stupid Your Ex Is Back to Haunt You So Let’s Get Drunk and Make the Best of It party on Friday._

“Right,” I say, blinking away the compliment and diving back into Dr. Finnegan’s weekly readings. “Right.”

“I’m just gonna post it. Mind if I tag you?”

I know that I’m nodding, I know that I’m not listening. Words swim in and out of focus on the page and I’m drowning in indecision. This is nice. It’s easy.

Why are easy and nice never enough?

**Simon**

The lesson here, I tell myself as I try to stop the panic attack building in my chest, is to stop bringing my mobile to the toilet. That’s the real problem. Obviously. 

Not that Baz is on a date with some ridiculous looking (fucking fit) bloke.

Not that he looks more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him.

Not that he’s sitting across from fucking _Daniel_ right now looking all happy and **_cute_** and I can’t even talk to him until one in the fucking morning.

No. No. The real issue, the take home message, is that I really shouldn’t scroll through Insta in the loo. John keeps telling me it’s unsanitary—he’s probably right (blokes like _Daniel_ probably know better) (probably have wonderful hygiene) ( _Daniel_ definitely doesn’t wash his hair with bar soap).

**_Cute._ **

I know he looks cute—anyone with eyes knows it—but who the fuck does Daniel think he is? He can’t just…say that.

_Do you have a monopoly on thinking me cute, Snow?_

“NO!” I yell at the vanity.

**_Cute!_ **

Minutes tick by and Daniel’s profile becomes my obsession. I dive into his photos, scrutinizing every detail of this monster, this fucking villain who…

…who volunteers at his local animal shelter (of course he does)…

…and bakes (fuck, I can’t hate someone that good at decorating cupcakes)…

…and seems to love his mum very much (the photo where he’s mussing her hair with a beach at their backs has me falling in love with him)...

Fuck. This is bad.

_Did you think that I would wait forever? For a man who didn’t want me?_

I hadn’t thought he would, but the realization that I’d hoped for it hits me so hard, I’m glad I’m sitting down. It’s with my pants around my ankles and my dignity furloughed that the weight of how shitty I’ve been hits me.

I left him. Ignored him for literal years. Drunk texted him in the middle of the night. Am currently losing my shit because someone else is making him happy.

“I’m such a fucking prick.”

_It’s a revelation! The lump is self reflecting! Stop the presses! This is a moment for the history books._

“You know what,” I answer the voice in my head, because that’s always an excellent idea. “You’re not even wrong.”

A gentle knock on the door sends my mobile crashing to the floor. “Fuck!”

“Simon,” Penny says, softly, as if she’s scared I might run away. (I have. Run away from her. I left for two days once and the red rims around her eyes when I finally came back ensured I never did that again). “Are you…talking to inner Baz again?”

“No,” I mumble.

“Do you want to come out and talk to me about it?”

“No.” But that’s half the problem, isn’t it? That it took a conversation with my guilt complex that I’ve named Baz to realize how catastrophically awful I’ve been.

“Um. Maybe yes, actually,” I say, half hoping she’s walked away, half hoping she stayed.

“Pull up your pants, then,” Penny says, “and come out here and talk to me properly.”

Scraping my phone off the floor, I swallow my pride, haul up my jeans, and open the door.

“That’s better,” she says, and for the first time in a long time, those brown eyes aren’t coated in some awful mix of disappointment, concern, and guilt. “Am I going to have to re-instate my Baz quota?”

My stupid fucking feelings have left me wobbly. “Uhh…” Honesty is always the best course of action with Penny. “Probably?”

She sighs and it’s a bit dramatic, but her fingers are gentle when they take me by the elbow and direct me to the sofa. “Some things never change.”

**Baz**

_Baz (1:14 am): Alright, fine. I’ll message first for once. Are you happy, Snow?_

_Baz (1:27 am): Apparently not. I’ll admit, it’s a bit strange not hearing from you. Do I sound needy? Wait. Don’t answer that._

**Simon**

“I love him, Pen.”

“I know.”

“I’ve loved him for so long.”

“I know.”

“I never told him.”

“I know, Simon. I know.”

**Baz**

_Baz (1:46 am): I suppose I’ll talk to you tomorrow._

_Baz (2:01 am): Goodnight, Simon._

**Simon**

**Simon (2:44 am): fuck fuck sorry somehting came up and i lost track of the time**

**Simon, draft, unsent (2:45 am): i wanna call you. I want to hear your voice. I want to get in my horrible car that you will make fun of and drive to your flat. I want to see you baz. I want to go back to that day at the airport and stop myself from making the biggest mistake of my life. I want so many things. I want you.**

**But sometimes, its not about what i want you know? Im gonna try and do better from now on. Cause you deserve it. So im gonna stay here and respect your boundaries.**

I stare down at the message that I’m not planning to send. All of the text is selected and my finger is hovering over the backspace, ready to delete.

Maybe it’s the hour, the time of night when normal rules don’t apply.

Maybe it’s the realization that there have been so many messages I never sent. Stretching back to those early days, when things had started to go wrong and I hadn’t known what to say. The sheer volume of concerned texts from Baz could bury me alive.

_Are you alright, Snow?_

**Unsent: no. im not. im drowning baz and im so fucking scared**

_Would you like me to swing by with a coffee?_

**Unsent: yeah but im also terriffed to let you come over cause what if you realize that im never going to be good enough. not anymore without my magick. and then youll leave and i cant do this without you baz**

_We could join a sports team, if you wanted. I could use it as an opportunity to demonstrate how I’m a superior specimen and that no other man will ever compare._

**Unsent: i already know that baz. your it for me. you always were**

_How did you find your first counselling session? You don’t have to say if you don’t want to. But I’ll have you know, it’s still gossiping if you talk about me behind my back._

**Unsent: it was awful. she just stared at me and it was fucking awkward and i dont know how to do this baz! what if im broken and no one can fix me??**

_I’m worried about you._

**Unsent: i know. im sorry im so so sorry**

_I don’t know what to do, Simon. Please tell me what to do._

**Unsent: i wish i knew. you deserve better than this than some chosen one who should never have been chosen you deserve so much more than this**

_Goodnight, Simon._

**Unsent: I love you baz**

So many messages, so many replies left unsent.

Maybe it’s the weight of a thousand letters that never managed to find their mark, or maybe it’s the way Penny’s arms had felt as she hugged me before she finally went to bed, or maybe it’s past one o’clock and fuck it, I’m feeling brave.

It’s time, I think, as I stare down at the mess of honesty on the edge of being deleted, to try something different.

**Simon, draft, unsent (2:45 am): i wanna call you. I want to hear your voice. I want to get in my horrible car that you will make fun of and drive to your flat. I want to see you baz. I want to go back to that day at the airport and stop myself from making the biggest mistake of my life. I want so many things. I want you.**

**But sometimes, its not about what i want you know? Im gonna try and do better from now on. Cause you deserve it. So im gonna stay here and respect your boundaries.**

I add one line

**cause nothings sexier than respect.**

I move my thumb up

swallow

and hit send.

**Baz**

_Baz (7:43 am): I’m having a party on Friday at the King’s Head (Dev’s idea, don’t question it), if you’re available._

_Baz (7:45 am): I’d like it. If you were to come. I would like that very much._


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hopsy bread water, Dev’s right hook, Care Bear slippers, and the stalking of Simon Snow by the cunning Penelope Bunce.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end is nigh, friends! The resolution will arrive and we are on the precipice of a happy ending.

**Baz**

“I cannot believe you’ve subjected me to this squalor,” I say, looking suspiciously at the tabletop and trying to resist the urge to cast a subtle cleaning spell.

“What do you think, Niall?” Dev’s returned from the bar, and I can’t believe how many people are willing to endure the smell of stale beer and the thrum of a fucking accordion.

The stomp of countless feet on the hardwood dance floor reverberates through the place and everything feels—

“Alive!” Niall says, taking the giant glass from Dev’s outstretched hand and sipping at the foam. “It’s so…alive.” Niall’s got his head cocked to the side and is looking at my cousin with such casual affection, it makes my stomach ache.

Dev slides me a second giant mug of beer so dark it looks black. _I’m not going to drink that._

“Yes, you’re going to drink that,” Dev says, scooting into the chair beside me and slapping me on the back with such raw enthusiasm that I can’t really be held accountable for the smile pulling at my lips. “You’re going to get properly sloshed and then we’re gonna rub shoulders with the proletariat down there. By the end of it, you’ll be singing a merry tune and dancing the jig.”

“Have you met me?” I try to sound scathing—I really do—but I just can’t muster the energy.

“Of course. It’s why all my guesses are so calculated.”

“I hate you both,” I say, taking a sip of the sludge and nearly spitting it back into the glass. “And this is disgusting.”

“It’s a man’s beer,” Dev says and then squeals as Niall reaches out and twists his nipple.

“Quit being sexist, Dev. It’s boring.”

“I’m so glad you’ve decided to play good cop again.”

“And where is your friend?” Niall says and I’m back to hating him so fast, the glimmer of affection feels like an illusion.

“Right.” I swallow hard. This could go one of two ways. “I didn’t invite Daniel, actually—”

“I fucking told you!” Dev shouts, but the pub is so loud, no one hears him over the din and the dancing. “I knew he wasn’t real—”

I dive in. That’s really the only way to do this. “Because I invited Snow instead.”

“No.”

“You didn’t.”

“Baz no.”

“What the fuck?”

“This is a gathering explicitly designed to help you stop obsessing over—”

“You realize that defeats the purpose—”

“This is a Fuck Simon Snow Party!—”

“I can’t believe you went and fucking—”

“This is not going to end well.”

I let them yell it out, wait for their protestations to simmer and fizzle.

“Are you quite finished passing judgement on my life choices?”

“No,” Dev mumbles into his beer, looking at the murky liquid as if it were responsible for the demise of his Get Over Snow efforts.

I ignore him like the responsible adult that I am. “I know you don’t agree and, just give me a second Dev, and let me get this out,” I say, holding my hand up to his open mouth. “You don’t agree and I know you’ve got plenty of good reasons. But I’ve made a choice and I’m going to need at least…” I survey the disgusting vat of hopsy water in front of me. “At least three more of these before I’m ready to confront the consequences of aforementioned choices.”

“Is that posh for, I need to get drunk before my ex-lover shows up?” Niall asks, and Dev nods.

“You’re both insufferable and I don’t know why I bother with either of you.”

“Shut the fuck up and chug that,” Dev says. I open my mouth to argue, but Dev is already unlocking his jaw and pouring the pint down his gullet—I can’t help but picture a pelican.

The ways Niall’s eyes trace his ululating neck decides for me; I pick up my glass, press it to my lips, and let the cool liquid slip down down down.

**Simon**

The King’s Head smells of curry and sweat and stale beer and I’m half in love with it before I make it to the bar.

Baz is here.

The knowledge skirts under my skin, electric. Terrifying. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do. All of my worrying was used up in anticipation: my room is an unmitigated disaster, every article of clothing I’ve ever owned strewn across the space. 

“He’s not going to care what you’re wearing,” Penny had insisted, after I’d paraded half naked around the flat, waving one of my button-ups like a flag.

“But, but Pen, what if I only get this one shot. And I don’t wanna fuck it up. And it’s Baz. And I don’t want him to think I can’t dress. That I’m still a mess.”

“You are still a mess!”

“Not helping!”

Two hours post clothing explosion, I look down at my outfit; Penny eventually took pity on me and selected what she called “acceptable date attire” from the wreckage of my bedroom.

“These pants hug your arse.”

I rub my hands over my thighs, savour the way the pale blue denim feels against the meat of my palms. Still here. I’m still here.

“Wear the white shirt,” Penny had said, and handed me a simple looking shirt. “And push up the sleeves. Baz always stares at your forearms.”

I pick at the soft material, pushed past my elbows, trace a few stray freckles down my skin. Still here. I’m still here. And so is Baz.

All of my worrying and plotting and overanalyzing was spent in the hours after the text—that beautiful thing that arrived at seven in the morning. Not at one am. Not in the middle of the night. This was new. It was a chance. “Do you think he wants me to wait until one am?” I’d blathered, and Penny had wacked me in the shins with a rolled-up newspaper.

“Don’t you think you’re both past that, now?”

“I have no idea.”

“Simon, you’re going to show up just after ten. Late enough that you won’t beat them there and wait awkwardly—”

“—oh god, can you imagine!—”

“—and early enough that you’ll still get plenty of sober time with Baz.”

“What if I don’t want sober time? What is this anyway? It’s not a date, cause his minions’ll be there.”

“They’re not his minions, Simon.”

I’d barely heard her.

“But it’s not a random invite. It was on purpose. After I’d sent my stupid feelings cause I’m a fucking idiot and—”

“Simon, you’re spiralling.”

“Fuck, you’re right.”

It’s 10:23 and I’m here and that’s a victory in itself. John always told me that, when problems seem too big, to break them down. Into their component parts. Bite-sized pieces that you can handle.

Good advice swirling around my head and enough anxiety to power a city block, I close my eyes and breathe it all in. There’s live music playing down a flight of stairs, there’s laughter and yelling and the sound of feet hitting the floor in a cadence that should be impossible in a place with so much chaos. First, I’ll find the bar. And then I’ll sit down, and then I’ll take off my coat, and then I’ll have a drink. Maybe two drinks. And I’ll cast my eyes around for dark hair, for grey eyes. We’ll find each other.

We always do.

_Be brave, Simon._

With inner Baz’s approval, I march towards the bar and order a drink.

…

I noticed him after the first pint. Sitting with his back to me, his head tilted up, all that lovely skin on display, as he took swallow after swallow of a pint. Of beer. Baz fucking Pitch, chugging a beer.

The world feels off its axis.

Seeing him, barely twenty feet from me, real and in the flesh, something I could reach out and touch…my chest gets tight. Breaths start to come in fits and spurts. The world starts to go black around the edges, the room is suddenly so fucking small.

“You alright?” I latch on to the voice—it’s gravel and smoke and belongs to a man with a raven hair and the thickest beard I’ve ever seen.

“I—yeah.”

“You here with anyone?”

A laugh barks out of me, even though it’s still hard to breathe. “Just trying to work up the courage to go over and…talk to…someone important…someone I used to know.” The honestly just tips out of me.

“Looks like you might need another before you try that, eh?”

“Fuck, you’re probably right,” I say, and order us both a round.

...

Three pints later, and I’m still sitting on a squishy bar stool, craning my neck around bearded man—who’d told me his name was Harry. Every time I take my eyes off Baz, I’m almost worried he’ll disappear. That the possibility of this night will vanish before I can get my hands on it.

“You know,” Harry says as I order another drink. “You’re lurking now. That’s the only word for it.”

“Am not lurking!” I shout, a touch too loud. “I’m not!” I whisper-yell, sinking into a long sip of my pale lager.

_You’re lurking, Snow._

“It’s not gonna get any easier,” Harry says. “In my experience, anyway. The longer you wait, the harder it’s gonna be to tell him.”

“Tell him what!” Who does this dark-haired know it all think he is?

“How you feel. Obviously.”

“I…I’m not…” Crowley, I’m a disaster.

Harry’s grin is conspiratorial beneath all of that facial hair. “And this is where I make my exit.”

“What? Why?” It’s a whine and I’m a bit too buzzed to care.

“Because he’s coming over here, and as fit as you might’ve seemed when I first sat down, I don’t fancy getting in the middle of whatever this is.”

**Baz**

I noticed him the moment he walked in, a tangle of anxiety, golden curls, and a brown leather jacket I want to peel off his shoulders. 

“You’re chosen one’s here,” Dev growls at me.

“I know.”

I know he’s seen me, too. Those blue eyes are relentless, a force of nature concentrated in those pretty irises.

“You’re not going to have a panic attack, are you?” That’s Dev again, and I know he’s not making fun—the worry there is genuine.

“No.” My voice is hoarse. “No,” I try again. “Now, pass me your disgusting beverage.” Pale ale disappears in a half dozen desperate gulps.

“Someone’s chatting him up,” Dev says. He’s trying to sound calm about it, but I know better; Dev’s never really forgiven Snow for how he found me that day. I see it in the narrowed eyes and the guttural sound of his voice. “Maybe we should leave them to it.”

I’d seen tall dark and handsome slip in beside Snow. I slam Dev’s pint onto the table with a loud crack and push myself to my feet—which I’m relieved to see are not as wobbly as they probably should be. “Wish me luck,” I say and step out into uncertainty.

Into the chance that this could go all kinds of wrong, and I’m not ready to see him and that he’s not ready to be seen.

Into the tangle of everything I’ve felt for Simon fucking Snow and the real possibility that I could lose him. Again.

Into a swirl of harmonica and accordion and the howls of laughter and the cadence of a crowd united in something bigger than one person.

I step forward into something new.

**Simon**

“Snow,” he says, slipping into the newly vacated seat beside me, and fuck, I’m going to die. “You’re not stalking me again, are you?”

Black denim should be illegal, a crime against humanity. His jeans—I’ve never gotten used to Baz Pitch in jeans—hug those long fucking legs and I want him with a furious need so simple in it singularity, that I almost forget to be nervous.

But then he pushes some of his dark hair behind one ear, and the smell of bleach water and spilled soda is replaced with something so familiar it carves me open—cedar and bergamot. And all of a sudden, it’s too much. It’s all too much.

Memories of our shared life at the top of a tower, of the steam after a shower and the way the room smelled just like this. Late nights when I couldn’t leave the sofa, my face pressed into his neck, the tips of his hair splaying across my cheeks like a promise, and I breathed in the scent of him. It’s this. It’s us.

“Snow, are you alright?”

The nerves in his voice drag me back from the ledge—everything we do seems to hover over to a thousand-foot drop. I’ve got my face in my hands.

Fuck.

“Yeah, just a bit dizzy, is all.” I pull myself out of my palms and look up at him. Really look.

Long legs, a soft grey jumper, sharp cheekbones, grey eyes both staring at me, as if I’m a glitch, something impossible, something he can’t quite process.

“Hey, Baz.”

His name out of my mouth. A miracle.

**Baz**

There are so many things I should be worrying about right now, but all I can focus on is how close his knees are to mine. That, if I were to turn my chair and face him, we would be touching.

It seems impossible, after three years of so much distance, a canyon shorn open in front of the arrivals gate. After his insistence that he could never be good enough and my inability to keep fighting. It’s difficult, as it turns out, to fight for someone who didn’t love themselves enough to love me. And now he’s just sitting here. In front of me.

“I…” Snow is trying to fill the silence that’s getting stale. “I don’t...” He’s all bluster and red cheeks and ruined his hair. “Well, this is a bit weird, isn’t it?”

“Snow, you’ve never gone gently into anything, have you?”

His jaw relaxes into a smile so open and honest, it sucks the air from my lungs. “No. No I don’t think anyone showed me how.” Those tiny words turn into a laugh, and I follow him into it because his smiles are contagious.

And the tension and the history melts, dissolves into wave after wave of impossible laughter, and I remember that this is Simon and that I’ve never known anyone as well as I know him. And then it’s easy.

Simon orders us a two more drinks: disgusting bread water for him and a large glass of red wine for me and I ask, “What took you so long?”

“I was nervous, wasn’t I?”

I smile around the wine glass. “We you?”

“Fuck off, Baz.” And it’s right. It’s so right.

“You looked distracted.”

“You saw me? Why didn’t you come over?”

“Snow, you’ve got the subtlety of a pregnant rhinoceros. Of course I noticed you.” It’s you, Simon. It’s always been you.

“I was…” He tears at his hair and I bite down the urge to touch it. “I was trying to find the courage? To come over and talk to you.”

“Oh.” I take another deep swallow. “Well, that’s alright then.”

“Thanks,” he says, and I have no idea what for. And so I ask. Because he’s here, and I can.

“For what?”

“For being the brave one.” This is so easy that it’s hard.

“Don’t mention it,” I say, letting the buzz of two rapidly ingested pints and a bite of red wine carry me away. The world is starting to wobble and hum.

“Are you drunk, Basilton?” Crowley, if the alcohol hadn’t sent me reeling, those three syllables would’ve done it.

“I’d prefer not to comment. Now, tell me some sad tale of how you rescue orphans or stand up to oppressive systems of institutionalized power or whatever you do all day.”

“I love that, even half gone, you can still talk circles around me.”

The word love catches, like a snag and I’ve stopped breathing again. “Fuck off and tell me a story, Snow.”

With that supernova smile back on his lips, he does.

**Simon**

It feels stupid, now, but I spent the entire day scared. Sick with the feeling that what worked in the middle of the night wouldn’t have the structural integrity to stand up to the reality of a pub on a Friday.

Until I remembered that it was Baz and he was like breathing.

“Oh Snow! Snow!” he says, and his hands are flapping in that adorable way that only happens when Baz is really excited about something. “I want to try…well, you asked me a question while you were feigning interest in my studies.”

“I wasn’t feigning anything!” I have no idea what _feigning_ means.

“Shut up and keep pretending. I want to try something.”

Those grey eyes are alive and curious. I’m going to melt if he keeps looking at me like that. “What are you talking about?”

“Do you remember asking me about magickal souls? That night you vanished—quite rudely, I might add—to save some downtrodden youth from the evil clutches of the state?”

I can’t figure out if I want to punch him or kiss him, and hasn’t that always been the way? “Yes.” The word grinds out, halfway between a laugh and a growl.

“Well, would you like to know?”

“Know what?”

“If you have a magickal core. A soul. If you have always been magick or if all that power was just dumped into you by some poor excuse for a father figure.”

“Keep it up and I might punch you.”

“Am I being too much? I suppose that was a bit much.” He rests his chin in his hand and looks up at me through those dark lashes. Kiss or punch. Kiss or punch.

“You’re always too much, Pitch,” I say, and Aleister fucking Crowley, I want to trace the line of his jaw with my tongue. “And yeah. I…uh…wanna know.”

Baz’s eyes are wide and wild. “Are you sure?” He’s breathless.

“I’m sure.”

“Alright.” He turns to face me, our knees touching, the contact hot and heavy in the dim light. “Hold up your palms,” he says.

“Like this?”

“Yes.”

I feel his fingers, featherlight against my flesh. I could die, right here, and that would be alright.

“Bring some of your magick to the surface,” he says, and his voice twists between us, a red thread tying us together.

“I can’t, Baz. It’s gone. It’s all gone.”

The words are thick, swirling in the space between our lips.

“Try.”

It’s stupid, but Baz has always driven me to the brink. I close my eyes and focus on the points of contact (knees, palms, the way his breathe rolls across my cheeks) and I reach for the magick I know died with the Humdrum, with the mage and Ebb and my shot at a future without nightmares.

“I’m going to cast,” he says, and I feel the words tangle with mine, feel him knot us together in this impossible thing that he insists on trying when I know that I’m not magick. That I never was. “Don’t worry. The Normals won’t see.”

“Yes,” I whisper, helpless. 

“ ** _Listen to your heart,_** ” he says, and Baz’s magick is hot under my skin, frantic and alive in the air between us. My eyes drift open, because I’ve seen his face now and even a few seconds without it is too long.

“Baz…” The air is a living thing, twisting and turning, breaking apart and reconnecting. I can feel the light of the sun filtering through towering pine trees, can sense the endless stretch up to a sky that will never reach back. I can smell of green wood burning, can taste it on my tongue. I breathe in damp soil and the grass after it rains, I breathe out the taste of dew and moisture turning the air crystalline. It’s all rising to the surface, skating along tiny threads, setting the air on fire.

The world is dancing, the moment laughter in a bottle, until I see the dark spot.

And I know. Fuck, I know.

“What…” Baz’s voice trails off, and I can feel the curiosity become tangible, feel the heat of his magick tracing the lines between us, reaching for the gaping wound right at the centre of the tapestry.

He’s going to look at it. He’s going to see.

The lines are delicate as a light on a lake, and they turn to rot around the wound—soggy and limp. It’s wrong; that’s the only word for it. The disgust roiling around in my belly is mirrored on Baz’s face. I can taste the metallic tang of blood in my mouth, can hear the pathetic little flaps of a wing halfway removed from my shoulder blade.

_They took my wings._

Feel fingers picking at the heart of me, can feel my magick—because that must’ve been what it was—being sliced and torn to pieces. A dissection of who I was, of what I used to be.

_No. I gave them away._

“Oh no.” I don’t know what to say. How to cover myself up. How to hide from this.

He was never supposed to know. He can’t know. He can’t.

“Simon,” he says, and I want to cry. “What did you do?”

“Please, make it stop.”

I feel his fingers lift from my palms, watch the threads fade to dust, and try to swallow the nausea that’s spilling all over the place.

“What…what…” Baz has lost his words, his lips are moving and nothing is coming out. 

“Please don’t.”

“Simon.”

I try to stand up, but the world is spinning and my guts are on their way up my throat.

“Let me help you.” Baz follows me and we’re both on unsteady feet. I feel his fingers on my arm, feel the steadying, unbreakable force that has always been Baz.

“Don’t.” I try to sound stern, but the word is a wheeze. I hear someone hurry forward, hear two voices arguing.

“Is everything all right?” My memory scrambles for purchase. Niall. That’s Niall.

“Snow gonna be sick, or what?” Dev.

But Baz hasn’t moved away from me, has one hand on either side of my body, is holding me half limp and barely standing. “Simon, what did you do to your wings?”

“Please don’t.” The world is spinning. Out. I need to get out.

Cool fingers reach around me, in something that could’ve been a hug but isn’t. I feel them fumble, and I’m tumbling into a storm of panic without a parachute. Baz touches my shoulder blades, searching for answers.

“No!”

It’s Watford and fifth year all over again, where I’m desperate and angry and Baz is pushing me too far. My hands are on his chest and I need him off me. Right now.

I shove, and it’s hard and violent, and I hear him let out a tiny huff of surprise before he’s falling. He must’ve hit a chair, because the sounds of wood landing on concrete bang around my ears.

Everything is still spinning, heaving, and in the centre of it lies Baz, a heap on the floor, grey eyes hurt and confused.

“You pushed me. Why did you push me?” The look on his face cracks me in two.

I move for him, the urge to pick up the pieces a compulsion. I can’t look away. “Baz, I’m sorry. I—"

The fist comes out of nowhere and hits my jaw with enough force to break bones.

“You stay away from him, you fucking asshole.”

My body snaps back and something in my face crunches. “What the—” There’s blood pooling out of my nostrils.

“You don’t get to touch him anymore. We’re not fifteen and you’re not the Chosen One with a blanket pass on hurting people, so get the fuck out of here.”

The music is still bouncing away, happy and whimsical and thick between my ears.

“Dev? No. What are you doing?”

“I told you this was stupid. I fucking warned you.”

“Dev.” Baz’s voice is clipped and cold in the way I know means he is very close to losing it.

I did that. I did that.

“You never listen! Never when it comes to him.”

A new voice. “Can’t be fighting in here, lads. If you want to be at that, you need to take it outside.”

I’m trying to staunch the blood flowing down my chin with my shirt. “ _Wear the white one_ ,” Penny had said. “ _Baz likes you in white_.”

“It’s alright, I’ll go,” I say, and my voice sounds like its underwater. “I’ll go.”

“C’mon, Snow.” I feel that steady weight of Baz again, and for a moment, the world stands still.

“Are you fucking serious?”

“Dev, drop this. Now.” Baz’s words will cut you if you’re not careful. “I’ll be back inside in a moment.”

When did this night go so wrong?

We’re moving, the mess of the pub blurred and out of focus. All I can see is Baz, his jaw set, his eyes cold, and stable in a world that I can barely hold onto.

**Baz**

Simon is sagging against my arm, breathing hard. Flecks of blood mark the path out of pub, breadcrumbs of a night that shouldn’t have ended like this. The evidence is splashed across his white shirt. Cool air whooshes as we stumble into the street.

“What the fuck, Snow?” _I’m touching him. I need him to stop touching him if I’m going to get through this._ I throw him against the building.

“Sorry,” he slurs, slumping a little into the brickwork, and I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with him. It’s all gone to shit and don’t even know where to begin.

The street is empty but for the two of us, and I can feel the finality of this moment. This only ends one way, and I’d known it was coming. Known, and followed him here anyway. Because nothing about him is inconsequential and I was never going to be able to limit the damage.

I slip my wand from my sleeve and murmur, “ ** _Get well soon_**. ** _”_** These days, healing is old hat.

“Thanks.” He can’t look at me, his eyes still glazed, his body made of elastics.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Right now?” He laughs, and it’s an ugly thing. “Or in general?”

“I don’t know, Snow,” I snap. “Both?”

“I’m uh…” His body folds in half, forearms on his calves, and I watch him dry heave. “Trying very hard not to sick up.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Not this drunk,” he says, his curls falling across his forehead, face obscured by shadow.

“Then what the fuck is wrong with you?” I know that I sound afraid—too tired and raw to mask it—and maybe that’s why he answers.

“Uh...” His breaths are tight. “I’m trying pretty hard not to dissociate right now.”

“Dissociate…”

“Don’t wanna deal with any flashbacks. But my back is…” Another shuddering breath, another dry heave. “Kind of a…trigger?”

“A trigger…”

“Does that make sense?”

“No.” It’s honesty, scared out of me.

Simon laughs and then is properly sick. I watch the mess sprinkle on his trainers.

He looks so broken, bent over and shaking, and I don’t know what to do. _I’ve never known how to help you, Simon. Did you know that?_

The beat of the music is still thumping away—it punctuates the silence between us like a laugh track. Except there is nothing funny about this moment. “Come away from there,” I finally say, because I don’t think he would’ve moved if I hadn’t done it. “We don’t need to look at your vomit all night.”

Simon takes a few wobbling steps, and I’m reaching for his arm as soon as he’s close enough to touch, because I’m weak and he needs me.

“C’mon. There’s a bench. You should sit.”

The night air has bite, and I can’t help but think that Dev was right; November is a shit month.

“At least the stars are out,” Simon says to his feet.

“Your wings,” I say because I can’t shake it. The way that his magick had molted around a wound. I’d read about spell damage, about repairing broken threads, but this…

“Baz,” he whispers, and I know that if my ears were human, I’d have missed it. “I can’t. Please. I can’t.”

The volume of what Simon can’t talk about weighs heavy between us.

“Why not?”

“Please.”

I wish please was good enough.

“Snow, I don’t know what you thought this was.” The words are pouring out. “If I was just casually texting you for a laugh or inviting you out to catch up.” The stopper that usually keeps my feelings bottled has come undone. “But I’m not interested in self-flagellation. In torturing myself with your words and the sound of your voice and you, solid, here in front of me.” _Not really. Not at the bottom of it all._

“I want…” I take a deep breath and brace myself for what I need to say. “I want more.”

Those blue eyes find me and hold on. “You want more.” He says it like a statement. Like nutritional information on the back of a box of crackers. Like these are words completely divorced from what he could have. “Really?” The tinge of hope breaks my heart.

“Really.” I’m crying on a park bench in front of Simon Snow. “But not…” And here’s the hard part. The part where I ask for something in return. “Not like it was before.”

“I don’t under—”

“You have to let me in.” He winces, and I know the rest of this conversation is going to hurt. Every word an autopsy of what we used to be. “You have to talk to me and tell me things. You have to want to get better. You have to want more than this…”

“You’re all I want, Baz.”

It hurts to have him and to know you can’t keep him

_No. No. No._ I wish that were enough. It wasn’t last time. It won’t be this time.

“No.” _I can’t do this again. I can’t go back to that place where he’s drowning and I have to watch him go._

“What do you mean?”

“I need…” _Breathe through it and be brave. Be like Simon._ “I need more than what’s left when you’re…” I can’t bring myself to say it. So instead, “I need more.”

I see my words land, and the pain on his face is stark against the streetlight. “More than what’s left…” He’s mouthing my words back to me, those blue eyes a mess of want and shame. “You think that’s what we were—”

“Simon, you haven’t been okay and you’re not…you’re not now. I need you to want to get better. And not for me. For you.”

Simon smiles weakly. “You sound like John.”

“John is right.” I want to reach out, to wrap him in my arms and pull him against my chest. To promise him that everything will be okay and that tomorrow will be different. But it won’t. Not if Simon doesn’t want it to be.

“I can’t fix you,” I say to the night.

“I know,” Simon says to his feet.

November winds whisper in our ears, sweet nothings without the promise of spring. Traffic hums a lullaby, a melancholy thing about the night that could’ve been but wasn’t.

“You should go,” Simon says, and there’s a finality in his square shoulders and a weight in his tone that allows for no discussion.

I leave him there. On the bench under the stars.

When I slip my mobile from my pocket to compose my first message to Penelope Bunce in three years, I notice that it’s just past one o’clock.

It’s this that finally break the tedious hold I’d had on my composure. This tiny tradition, a vestige of Natasha Pitch, that I’d come to attach to so much hope. “Ashes,” I whisper. “It’s all just ashes, mother, and we all fall down.” And I come undone.

**Penelope**

_Baz (1:02 am): Hello Bunce. I know it’s been a long time since we’ve spoken and I’m truly sorry to message you like this, but Simon needs you._

_Baz (1:02 am): He is currently sitting alone on a park bench. I will send a pin to his location._

Penelope (1:05 am): Basil, what happened? Are you alright? I’m on my way. Please don’t go far. It would be wonderful to see you again. 

Penelope (1:06 am): I’ve missed you, Baz.

**Simon**

Cold sweat coats me like a second skin, and the city air is licking my wounds. My hands are shaking as I pull out my phone.

1:02 am. Past one o’clock. Of course it is.

_The world’s gone to bed_. I hear Baz’s voice in my head, and I’m not sure if it’s memory or inner monologue. _You might encounter something not human._

I cut my monster parts off and, still, here I am.

Monstrous. With no one to tell me they’re mine. 

_I need more than what’s left when you’re done._

The thoughts aren’t coming anymore; they’re here. They’ve been here for a while. Wave after awful wave.

I want to scream.

I want to run until my lungs bleed.

I want to drink until I can’t feel my face.

I want to dance until I can’t feel my feet.

I want to disappear into another person’s touch.

_I need you to want to get better._

The problem is that none of that—not the running, the drinking, the dancing, the fucking—none of that helps. It numbs and it pauses and it distracts, but it doesn’t help.

_I can’t fix you._

This, I realize, is rock bottom. I’ve landed and it’s time, it’s finally time, to start trying to crawl out.

I take out my mobile, check to make sure that his address is actually there, and call a cab.

**Baz**

Incoming call, Penelope Bunce

“He’s not there.” Bunce’s voice is exactly as I remembered it—swift, concise, brilliant.

“He’s not what?” I say, and shudder as I realize that I sound very much like I’ve been crying. Because I have.

“Baz, do you have a cold.” And Bunce notices immediately, of course. 

“Yes. I’m stuffed up. It’s quite a vicious bug.”

“Sure. Whatever. Baz, I’ve looked all over this park. He’s not here.”

“I’m not sure what you expect me to do about that,” I say, unsure what else she wants from me.

“Well, nothing really. I have an app installed on his phone for just these occasions.”

“You have a what?”

“An app! That tells me Simon’s location, so long as his phone hasn’t died. It hasn’t, has it?”

“I have no idea why you think I would any insight into the remaining charge on Snow’s mobile.”

“Fair enough. I’m going to go find him now,” she says, as if this is the most normal thing in the world. 

“Why did you call me?”

“I’ve missed the sound of your voice, Baz. We were friends once.” My ribs are cracking open all over again.

“I can’t believe you have an app to track Snow’s location in real time. It’s a tad excessive, even for you Bunce,” I say, in an effort to dodge even more feelings. 

“Of course I do. You weren’t around for the Simon-falls-asleep-in-other-people’s-apartment-entranceways stage of his depression, Baz. You’d have gotten an app too.”

“I have no doubt, Bunce,” I say, a little fond.

“Alright, I’ve got a ping on his location. Gotta run. Talk soon, Baz. I mean it.” You can tell. She does.

“I look forward to it.” I mean it too.

**Simon**

It’s properly late by the time I step out of the cab and up to the entrance of the apartment block.

He might not answer. He might send me to voicemail. Might have a girl over. Might sleep through it.

Still, I find my courage—this _is_ bottom and it can’t really get much worse—and dial.

John picks up on the second ring, his voice thick with sleep. “Simon? Is that you?”

Merlin and fucking Morgana, I hadn’t thought about what I’d do if he actually answered. Fortunately, the mania takes over. “Uh, yeah. It’s me. I’m kinda…well, see I hit rock bottom, I think. And you said to come to your place, and I know you probably didn’t mean past one o’clock when you said anytime, but I didn’t know what else to do and now I’m here and I’ve dialled and I can’t really take it back. Fuck, please stop me from talking now.”

Laughter rumbles through the line. “Hang on, I’ll buzz you up.”

John is wearing a bathrobe and enormous Care Bear slippers when he opens the front door of his flat. “Not one word about the slippers,” he says, “or I’ll kick you right back to the curb.”

“I need you to trust me,” I say, quiet and still hoping he’ll send me away.

“I do.”

“And not commit me. I’m gonna say some weird shit.”

“Anything Simon.” His face is dark with scruff and he’s scrubbing his hands through his hair, but he’s serious.

He makes tea and so it is into a cup of Earl Grey that I let it out. All of it. The Mage and Ebb, the blood and the wings, losing myself and then losing Baz. The flashbacks and the and nightmares. The whole bloody mess tumbles into my mug.

When it’s over, I feel exhausted in a way that is different from the times I’d run myself to death or stayed out past dawn.

“I’ll make you up a bed,” John says, but his sectional is long and squishy, and his living room is so warm, and I’m just going to put my head down for a little while, that’s all.

I’m asleep before he comes back for me.

At some point in the middle of the night, Penny’s voice mingles with John’s, and there’s a fair bit of yelling about me and magick and Baz and manners.

_It will get better, Snow._

But no one bothers me and so I let the waves of sleep carry me back, to this lovely place, a dream on the edge of the world, where the sand meets the sea.

_It has to get better._


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lists, tattoos, ledges hovering over thousand foot drops, and broken wings that still manage to fly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading this angsty love letter. <3

**Baz**

The cab flies through the night, streetlights strobing and stretching, by and by and by. My heart pounds a single note—no breath between the beats, punching one long hole through blood and flesh and bone.

“You alright?” Niall.

I don’t answer. Just let the cool air wash my face.

My synapses are staging a revolution. Thoughts are vibrating with abandon and I can’t reign them in, I can’t stop them.

I don’t try.

Memories flash in time with the streetlights, our history illuminated in the soft lines of light.

_The sky in the desert is black as pitch and filled with stars. He knocks my face into mine. “Can I?” he asks? Can you what, Simon. Kiss me? Kill me? Break my heart?_

“Baz?” Dev. But my I’m trapped in a loop.

_Snow sleeps in a knot, his legs pulled up and his first drawn in, his shoulders hunched high, head tucked low, his hair a crush of curs on the pillowcase. What little moonlight there is catches his tawny skin._

What does it mean, when you throw away the one thing you’ve wanted since before you knew how to want? Something you wanted so singularly, so obsessively. I was ready to die on your sword, Simon Snow. Why is it so hard to take your hand?

_Baz, draft, unsent (2:25 am): I’m sorry about what happened. Dev definitely should not have hit you, although he insists you deserved it. Crowley, I don’t know what to say and yet here I am, trying to force my feelings into a text. This is hopeless._

_Baz, draft, unsent (2:58 am): I wish I could say that I didn’t mean it. A part of me is so desperate to be the reason that you get better. I want to be there to try and fix everything. But I’ve tried that before and I can’t. I just can’t._

_Baz, draft, unsent (3:04 am): fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuc_ _k fuck_

December, 2020

**Simon**

My fingers are making a mad dash for honesty. Penny is hovering over my shoulder, trying to pretend that she is not reading every word I punch out with my clumsy thumbs.

**Simon (12:31 pm): Penny says that I backspace my feelings out of existence and I think she’s right. So I’m not doing that anymore. No more drafts unsent.**

**Simon (12:34 pm): Fuck I hate this.**

**Simon (12:36 pm): whatever, I’m messaging for a reason. Trying to anyway.**

**Simon (12:37): I’m gonna leave you alone Baz. Until I figure my shit out. Until I’ve sorted through some stuff. Cause you said things, really hard things, the other night that I didn’t want to hear. And I got kinda pissed until I realized you were right.**

**Simon (12:38 pm): You shouldn’t have to fix me**

**Simon (12:39 pm): Please, don’t answer this. Seriously, don’t. Don’t reply and don’t wait. I know that like, you’re a fucking ten and you probably go on lots of dates and have lots of great sex or whatever. So like, keep doing that!**

**Simon (12:40 pm): I hate this.**

**Simon (12:41 pm): What I’m trying to say is thanks? For being the only person who could ever stand up to me, even when im being awful?**

**Simon (12:42 pm): Christ, I fucked this up. I need to stop typing.**

**Simon (12:43 pm): Ps see how brilliant my grammar is! I figure that’s important to you, so I’m…yeah. Okay. Chow.**

“Chow?”

Sunlight is streaming through the living room window in sheets of gold and glitter. The day is so cheery, I shouldn’t be trembling. But I am.

“Fuck off, Penny.”

“Considering everything, I’d say you did fairly well.” Penny’s got her feet curled up underneath one of the couch cushions. Our heads are pressed together on the lumpy sectional and we’re both staring down at the messages.

“That was hard,” I say. And so is admitting it.

“Your grammar is pretty good,” she says, grinning down at the blue wall of text. “You did good, Simon.” 

“I look fucking mental.”

Penny nods, absently. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

I want to tell her to fuck off again, but the threat has diminishing returns. Instead, I try some honesty. After that message to Baz, it feels a bit like a drug. “I’m so fucking anxious right now, I kinda wanna throw up?”

Penny raises a hand, slowly, and lets it rest on my shoulder. My stomach turns to worms, but the touch is comforting.

“How’s your list going?” she asks, letting her hand just rest, and I feel some of the twisting in my guts settle a bit.

“It’s…okay,” I say, and mean it.

Penny had stayed at John’s that night, curled up at the end of the sofa. I woke up to two giant brown eyes popping up out of a huge purple duvet. “You look like frozen dog shit,” she’d said.

John had made waffles—of course he was a good cook. Can’t be god’s gift to mankind if you’re not also a wiz in the kitchen. I’d hate him if I didn’t already love him so much.

The whole thing was fucking awkward for reasons I probably should’ve anticipated—like John learning about magick and Penny not playing well with others. Her two friend slots were already taken and John was an unknown entity.

“I like lists,” Penny had said, cross legged in John’s kitchen. “Lists have always pulled us through rough patches. Like when we solved the mystery of Baz’s dead mum. Oh! And when we saved the world of mages from the existential threat of the Humdrum.”

“Wha—” John’s mouth had fallen open as a pool of white goo dropped from ladle to waffle iron.

“Sometimes, I feel like you forget that I was mostly saving the world from myself,” I’d said. “It was a bit a mind fuck, realizing that you’re the hero and the villain of your own story.”

“Yourself? Hero. Villain…what?” John squawked.

“Oh, do keep up,” Penny snapped. I don’t think she liked John much—not in the beginning.

“I only just learned that magick existed. Cut me some slack.” There was a soft dusting of flower on the tip of John’s nose.

Penny had fixed him with her most serious glare. “No.”

The whole thing was getting awkward. “Have you poisoned her against me?” John had said, sliding a golden brown waffle onto my plate, looking a bit scandalized.

“Nope. That’s just Penny. You get used to it.”

She’d probably have skinned me if she’d heard, but Penny was digging in her purse for stationary. “Right,” she’d said. “A list. Titled Simon’s Plan to Unfuck His Life.”

“S’bit harsh,” I’d said, looking to John for support, but he’d only smiled, a bit soft, in Penny’s direction.

“I like harsh.”

I pull that same paper, a month old now, out of my pocket. It’s lined and crumpled from a thousand foldings and unfoldings, of anxious fingers pressed to parchment.

“Let’s see,” Penny says, uncapping her felt tip pen and handing it to me. I cross off **Send heartfelt message to Baz about what a fuck up you’ve been and how you want to give him space while you get your shit together** (this item was written in Penny’s handwriting).

“So, what’s next on your list?” she asks, elbowing me in the ribs.

I gulp. I know what’s next. **~~Throw myself at Dev and Niall’s feet and beg their forgiveness~~ **(Penny’s handwriting, which I’ve crossed out). **Apologize to Baz’s friends for being a bit of a wanker (and ask them not to mention it to him, cause it might make him feel weird)**.

“Do I have to?”

“Yes.” Penny’s stare is without pity. One of the most significant changes since my collision with rock bottom is Penny. For so many months after Watford and then again after Baz, Penny had handled me with kid’s gloves, soft, as if she would ruin me with anything remotely stern.

“You were so…broken,” she said one night, a couple days after John’s place, and waffles, and lists. “I didn’t want to ruin the pieces of you that were left.”

“You won’t ruin me,” I’d whispered, and pressed a kiss into the top of her fuzzy head. “I’ll ruin myself if you don’t remind me what I shit I can be, sometimes.”

Unsurprisingly, Penny had taken me at my word, and it’s coming back to bite me now. “You’re the one who fucked it up with Dev and Niall. It’s your job to make it better.”

“Right,” I say to the floor.

“You could skip to the next one,” Penny says, pointing at **Get a counsellor and start going regularly.**

“I…” My throat feels tight. “Penny, I…I can’t…”

“Thought not. So, Dev and Niall then?”

“You’re ruthless, you know that?”

She nods, unperturbed. “It’s why Baz and I get on so well. Now, break it into actionable steps. Bite-sized pieces. What’s step one?”

“Uhhh—” Tight chest, cold sweat slick on my skin. “Find Dev’s number. Or Niall’s.”

“What an excellent idea. And how convenient that I have their contacts.”

“How—”

“Not relevant. Step two?”

**Baz**

_Draft, unsent (12:57 am): I want to send a reply to your message, Snow. It seems unfair that you get to dictate the terms of our arrangement. Although, this plan sounds suspiciously like Bunce trying to preserve my fragile emotional state and, one day, I’m likely going to thank her for that._

_This is not a rescue mission,_ I think for the hundredth time tonight. It is a small amount of independent research, just a few (twenty seven) library books for some light reading, that has absolutely nothing to do with Simon Snow’s mangled magick or the hole where his wings used to be. The titles spilling out beneath me, however, are begging to differ.

 ** _Repairing Catastrophic Spell Damage_** is facedown across my desk, its pages littered with sticky notes, tagged for relevant passages.

I’ve got **_Magick as Tapestry: Weaving and Untangling Complex Threads_** open beneath me, and my thumb is tracing a line of text.

I jot a note in the margin—neat and in pencil.

I’m just thinking about shifting to **_Creature Features: Fangs, Wings, and Other Magickal Things_** , just for a change of pace, when my phone hums. I don’t hesitate to reach for it; I’ve accepted that Simon Snow will forever be loosely associated with a peacock’s mating ritual.

**Simon (1:01 am): It’s that time again, yeah?**

There’s a slight delay between Snow’s messages these days. I think it’s because he’s editing, smoothing his messy texting into the best grammar he can manage. It makes me soft, thinking about it.

**Simon (1:02 am): You’d probably say something like “the little numbers in the corner of your phone are a clock, Snow. Are you only learning this now?”**

I snort. I can’t help it.

**Simon (1:02 am): Your mum was really good at telling stories. And I’m glad I get to have this one. Past one oclock. I’ve always wanted to tell you that.**

**Simon (1:03 am): Fuck, hope I’m not overstepping. Messaging you like this. Without anything super…important or relevant or whatever.**

**Simon (1:03 am): fuuuuuck, now im just spamming you in th emiddle of the night**

**Simon (1:03 am): goddammit**

“You’re an idiot Simon Snow,” I say, as my pencil lazily sketches a pair of wings.

**Simon**

For the first time in months, I walk through the doors of the YRC before John. My coat dangles from the rack, my computer is fully booted up, a cup of coffee is piping hot on the corner of his desk, when John wanders in at 8:02.

“Cinnamon bun?” he says, not drawing attention to it.

“Always.” I ravish the danish as soon as it’s in my hands. 

“I was an arsehole to you, once,” I say, cinnamon sugar sticky on my tongue.

“Once?”

“Shut up, I’m trying to say sorry.”

“Usually, that goes something like,” John screws up his face and I would hit him if I weren’t in the middle of apologizing for being an idiot. “I’m sorry, John, for being a reprehensible twat.”

“Glad we understand each other,” I say. 

“What! No! Now you need to do it.” John seems genuinely distressed that he might’ve missed the chance to see me grovel.

“Naw, you’ve got the gist, more or less.”

Those full eyebrows have furrowed into a bit of a pout.

“Seriously though, I was a bit of a tit to you. About counselling and stuff. And now I’m…” I take a breath. “I’m asking for that referral.”

Every other emotion melts off John’s face—except for relief. “I know just the person.”

**Simon**

**Simon (4:33 pm): Do you remember when you texted me after I went and saw a counsellor? Like, forever ago. You probably don’t. I didn’t answer you**

I want to ask if it’s normal for your brain to feel like scrambled eggs after a session. I don’t.

**Simon (4:34 pm): Anyways, I’m trying again. With counselling, I mean. I had my first session with this bloke John set me up with and I…well, I wanted to tell you about it.**

Would it have been different, if I’d talked about it? If I’d managed to crack a piece of myself open and let the light in?

**Simon (4:34 pm): I kinda wish I could say that it was mindblowing or amazing or whatever. But that wasn’t quite it. It was…heavy. I’m on the bus home, and I feel like im gonna pass out.**

**Simon (4:35 pm): But like…we talked. I know that’s the point of therapy. Fuck sakes, I do it for a living. Got business cards and everything. I dunno. I told him a little. And I think I might be able to tell him more. And he’s got a couple of plans for the sleep stuff and the intrusive thoughts and…**

**Simon (4:38 pm): It was good. That’s what I’m trying to say. It was good.**

Insecurity sinks into my skin, furious and poison, and I’m not breathing, can’t remember how to breathe. The palms of my hands knead my calves as I try to remember where I am.

_You’re on a bus, Snow. Public transit. Focus on the details._

Inner Baz has been much less of a dick lately. I don’t think too much about it.

**Simon (4:42 pm): If you don’t wanna hear any of this, please just like, send me a quick “STOP” or you can tell me to fuck off or whatever. You don’t have to reply at all.**

The bus grinds to a halt and I hear the metal hydraulics sink a little closer to the ground. It wasn’t so bad. Not really. As I let my head rest against the cool window pane and watch a couple of kids hurry out through the back doors and into the rain, I can’t help but feel relieved. That someone else is going to help me through the mess leftover after everything. That I won’t have to figure it out alone, that I won’t have to know what to do.

January, 2021

**Baz**

_Dry air, clawing at my throat, choking me with the heat. Unyielding. Sand and hills roll out in front of us._

_Simon is on the ground. His wing is bent the wrong way. He’s bleeding._

_“You didn’t want me,” he says, but he can’t, because he’s on the ground. His wing is bent the wrong way. He’s bleeding to death in the dirt._

_“I’m sorry.”_

_The sun beats against my cheeks and the dry air chaps my lips. Simon is on the ground. His wing is bent the wrong way. I want to go to him. To staunch the wounds crying red. But I can’t. My feet won’t move. I’m frozen in place and_

_Simon is on the ground_

_his wing is bent the wrong way_

_and he’s bleeding._

_“You couldn’t save me.”_

_The air has wrapped its hands around my neck, the heat is soft boiling my lungs, the sand closing in. Simon is bleeding out on the ground and now his wings are gone—bloody stumps that I will never get back._

_“You can’t fix me,” Simon says, except it can’t be him. Because he’s on the ground. His wings are gone. His back is bleeding. He’s curled up into a ball and he’s crying and and I can’t go I can’t move I can’t help—_

_“Simon!”_

My eyes lurch open, and I desperately scramble out of the nightmare and back to my bedroom. The yellow hum of the streetlamp outside drifts lazily in through the open window, and how the fuck is the world so still when my world was just a hornet’s nest of violence?

The sheets are tangled around my legs and that I’m suddenly far too hot, even though the room is chilly and my sweat is cold. Nightmares aren’t a new experience—Snow and I both thrashed and screamed atop our tower. This one though…I try to repress a shudder, the aftershocks vibrating under my skin.

Ghosts revenging themselves on my unconscious mind.

I can’t stop shaking.

It hurts. Even if it’s just a memory, twisted into something masquerading as real. It still hurts.

I reach for my phone, an instinct into which I am conditioned. Two months of texting Snow created a routine. And Simon Snow is an old habit that refuses to die hard.

_Baz, draft, unsent (1:01 am): I had a nightmare, Snow. I have them from time to time. I wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat and shaking under my sheets. My nightmares do have some variety—I’ve always had a creative mind, you know. But there is one that keeps coming back. It’s persistent in its desire to puree my sanity. It’s about you, of course. Crooked and broken on the ground. It’s not even the blood or the way your wing is bent. It’s losing you, Snow. It’s thinking that I’ve lost you forever._

_Baz, draft, unsent (1:02 am): Additionally, I’m very proud of you. For going to counselling, even once. And I’m happy you told me. Even if you think it’s late. I’m just happy you told me._

**Simon**

Something wet dribbles down my thumb and I realize that I’ve torn my cuticles to shreds. The anxiety under my skin is a fucking toaster oven that has ratcheted up in temperature since I started seeing Dr. Joel Barish.

“ _We knew that was a possibility_ ,” he’d said when I mentioned it. “ _You’re wading through complex trauma, Simon. It was going to mess you up a bit._ ” I like when he says stuff like that. Talks to me like a human rather than a patient.

Sleep’s been dodging my calls since 11:00pm, when I’d laid down and tried to dial in. Slipping my bloody thumb into my mouth, I pull my phone out of my bedside table (“ _Your phone isn’t exactly helpful for healthy sleep, Simon,_ ” Barish would say. “ _You should try to sleep without it_.”)

I send up a weak apology to no one and start to try and type with my left hand.

**Simon (1:08 am): I don’t go out at night anymore. Joel said it wasn’t helpful. That’s my therapist.**

It’s weird, being a counsellor who’s going to counselling. Knowing what therapeutic techniques Joel is trying to use. And then watching them work anyway. It’s a bit of a mind fuck.

_I suppose that’s the point of the exercise, Snow._

I want to send a goodnight message. I want it. Badly.

I’d told John about it this morning—grudgingly, grumpily.

Every morning, John takes one look at my face and passes judgement from his wheely office chair.

“Dog shit,” he’d pronounced this morning. “Not frozen though. It’s an improvement.”

“Is it?” I’d asked and he’d reflected on that for a moment.

“What kept you up?” he finally asked, letting his introspection on the merits of frozen and room temperature feces fall away.

John can always tell if I’ve slept—those x-ray eyes of his are basically a superpower.

“Usual stuff,” I’d said, but then forced myself to add, “Wanted to send a goodnight message to Baz. But it felt weird.”

“Why?” John asked.

“I dunno,” I’d said, rubbing at my eyes a bit. “I went so long not doing it, and now I feel like I shouldn’t, cause he probably hates when I text him. But like…” I trail off into silence and John has the audacity to wait—just wait—until I fill it. “He used to send me a text every night. It was just two words and…it probably didn’t mean much to him. But I was a fucking tit and never responded.”

“Okay,” John said, providing the appropriate single word answer.

“And like…what if I never make it up to him? There were so many nights I just—”

“Simon?” John had said, eyebrows furrowed into their serious position. “There are tons of nights left for you. You’ve got literal years to make it up to him. If you want to. You’ve got time.”

_You’ve got time._

Which is when I realized that I didn’t consider my life that way—had never accepted that there was a future for me, the option to just _live_ , for years and years and years.

 _You’re a Chosen One, past his expiry date,_ Inner Baz had monologued. _But you’re still here._

“I didn’t really think about my life like that before,” I finally said to John. “Was pretty convinced I was gonna die at seventeen.”

“That’s a bit fucked up, Simon.”

“Yeah,” I half laugh, half bark. “It was.”

My memory of that morning fades and I feel sleep finally starting to pull at my ankles. The world isn’t going to end in a battle of old values and new extremes and I’m not going die. I pop my bloody thumb out of my mouth and start to type.

**Simon (1:16 am): Goodnight Baz.**

February, 2021

**Baz**

University had always represented something more abstract than books and exams and caps and gowns tossed ceremoniously about. In my head (before I got here), it smelled like dust and old parchment, of ink and _learning_.

The reality of campus is a bit more stark. More panic and sweat and hangovers, more greasy keyboards and energy drinks and heavy bags under everyone’s eyes. Less musty old books and cathartic realizations.

My dreams of higher learning weren’t so much crushed as they were modernized.

I watch Dr. Finnegan flick through a PowerPoint presentation on the properties of thread elasticity and watch Daniel’s mouth droop—loose, open, and sleepy. 

“You wanna come to the library with me for a bit?” Daniel says, after Finnegan has wrapped up.

“No,” I say, not unkindly. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Kay,” Daniel says, his shoulders rolling into a shrug that’s sweet and understanding and means so well. Not for the first time, I envy his ability to just allow things to happen to him. It seems like Daniel was born without the ability to worry. I want to find this absence, tap into the lack, distill it and figure out how he manages to be so calm.

“I need to have a word with Dr. Finnegan,” I say, and Daniel nods, a sweet half-smile on his lips, before packing up and disappearing into a life that is easy and nice and will never be enough.

I flip open my notebook, filled with tight annotations and difficult spells, and march towards a future that I’ll have to fight for.

Finnegan watches me as I approach his desk while the rest of the class marches out. “Mr. Pitch?” he says, a bit of mischief in the wrinkles around his eyes.

“I need your help,” I say, sending up a quick prayer for confidence. “It’s about—”

“That hypothetical friend of yours, again?”

These after-class meetings have become quite regular since I saw the gaping wound in Simon’s magick.

“One and the same,” I say, ignoring the knowing smile.

“Alright. What would you like to discuss?”

“What if a patient’s magick was linked to a…” I swallow and reach again for confidence, “a physical manifestation of some kind. Like a wand or a violin or…” Finnegan is nodding along, so I just say it. “Or, like, say, wings.”

“Wings?” The mirth has slipped into intrigue, and I know in that moment that he’s going to help me.

“Hypothetically, wings. Yes.”

Finnegan closes his eyes, as if visualizing all of the books he has ever read, revisiting all of the patient files he’s ever consulted.

“Hypothetically, I think it would be possible, to have your magick be tied to a part of your physical body. Especially if you had used magick to create the wings. It would be a relic. But also an extension of yourself, much like a wand. It would be a part of you.”

I feel my pulse begin to race, feel the thrill of a theory confirmed.

“And what,” I ask, feeling brave, “would happen if those wings were removed? Hypothetically?”

Finnegan’s face blanches, but he recovers quickly. “You find new and creative ways to torture this hypothetical friend, don’t you?”

“I suppose.”

“It’s an act of violence, Basilton. A hole in your magickal core so substantial—”

“What if I wanted to repair it?” I look down at my feet, so he won’t see the desperation in my eyes. “Hypothetically.”

“Young man,” he says, and there’s emotion rippling between us. “The spell work required, the intimacy with which you would need to know the patient, the trust and the weaving…” I let him trail off, hope that he’ll find the end of his sentence.

Finally, “You wouldn’t have come to me without a plan.”

“Yes,” I say, rubbing my thumb against the thick paper.

“You might as well show me,” Finnegan says, gently. “Let us see if we can’t make your friend whole again.”

“Hypothetical friend,” I croak, my composure tumbling off a cliff.

“Of course.”

March, 2021

**Simon**

**Simon (3:45 pm): I’m getting a tattoo**

The tattoo parlour is clean and airy, the open concept all exposed brick and Edison lights.

“Why’re we doing this again?” John asks, for at least the tenth time today.

“It’s your fault really,” I say, thrusting the list—worn and soft from hundreds of hours in my back pocket—into his fist.

I point to the relevant item, but I don’t really need to. John knows what this is. He’s asking so that he’s sure I know it too.

**_~~Get over my wings~~ Process feelings about my wings ~~~~_**

This hadn’t been what I’d had in mind when I pressed those words to paper months ago. Joel’s voice, cool and low, echoes in my head. It had been a throwaway line. Something said at the end of a session that he probably hadn’t expected to mean anything.

_Sometimes, we wear our trauma on our skin._

It was simple, words spoken in our second session, not designed to send me into a freefall of self-reflection.

 _I wear it on my back_ , I realized.

Usually, I try not to look at it, avoid mirrors and reflections and the casual touches of strangers. That day, though, I’d gone home and just…looked. At the lava turned to stone. At uneven, angry chords across my back.

 _“Sometimes, we wear our trauma on our skin,”_ Joel had said.

 _“Is that bad,”_ I’d huffed, hands white knuckled on my chair.

 _“Not always.”_ Joel’s eyes were misty _. “But sometimes, we can take it back. Turn something painful into something…else.”_

“I want to make this…something else,” I say to John, breathing in the sunlight and the smell of disinfectant. “My back…I want to make it mine?”

“Are you sure you can do this?” John tries for nonchalance, but it comes out worried anyway—which makes sense, considering the last time he tried to touch me, I’d collapsed into a heap of flashbacks and panic in the men’s locker room.

“Probably? Me and Penny…we…broke it into actionable steps?”

And it’s true. Penny and I have a nightly ritual. Where I stand in the bathroom and she looks, and then touches, and sits with me, a safe distance away, if it all becomes too much.

“Mr. Snow?” The receptionist has a soft smile and a smart blonde bob.

“Yeah,” I choke.

“Sophie’s ready for you. This way, please,” she says. “Is he…coming with you?”

I can’t control my face but I look at John anyway.

_Asking for help isn’t the worst thing in the world, Snow. You should really do it more often._

“Yes,” John says, squeezing my shoulder. “Of course.”

…

“It’s…” Penny hasn’t stopped staring. Not since I teased my white shirt over my head and let her see.

“Red?” 

“Stunning.”

“Oh.”

“Well, red too,” she says, and I laugh.

It had taken hours—seven of them—and would need another session, at least.

“Oh Simon, she really did a lovely job.”

A memory of standing, after so many hours of not looking. Gritting my teeth and focusing on the sharp ache of the machine humming against my skin. Pain forming, pain reforging, pain transforming.

“Look,” Sophie had said, as John held me up, shaky legs a green sapling. And I had.

Penny is staring. Still staring at the deep red wings, folded against my shoulders and stretching down my spine, curling into my ribs. My key to the sky, made of ink, woven expertly into a mess of scar tissue, but mine just the same.

Mine.

Terrible.

And beautiful.

“Can you take a picture?”

“Sure.” Penny’s voice is still hushed. Still awed. “Why?”

“I want to send it to Baz.”

**Baz**

It took me two days to send the message. A thousand drafts that would never work. That would end with me dialling his number and spitting my heart onto the floor for him to squish. Eventually, reason, survival instinct, and a fishbowl of red wine prevailed.

_Baz (1:12 am): I don’t think I can keep this up, Snow. It’s painful, hearing about you from a distance. It’s too much and not enough._

The messages stopped after that.

The silence was too much and not enough.

…

Angry fists are pounding on my door—the cavalry is named Devereaux and he has come for me.

“Baz!”

“Go away!” My voice is a shriek and the sound startles me.

“It’s been two weeks! Open the fucking door.”

“No!” I’m petulant and shrill and I don’t care.

The gruff thumping sound settles, and, for a moment, I think I’m in the clear. Until I hear the sound of wood cracking, a deep groan and I realize that Dev is going to break in.

 _Aleister fucking Crowley._ He’s a persistent bloke, I’ve got to give him that. I abandon my perch on the middle of my bed and grab the first usable item to defend myself.

It’s really not my fault that it’s a goddamn ladle.

“Again!” Dev shouts as he bursts into my space, wand raised, wood chips exploding into an open concept. “What’s it with you and cooking utensils?”

“Get out.” The words are sharp, meant to wound. “I don’t want you here.”

“Of course you don’t. Doesn’t mean I’m leaving. God, Baz, his shirt again too!”

I hadn’t realized that I was in an oversized Simon Snow original. _This would be embarrassing if I could only get him to leave._

“I don’t need you. Nothing’s the matter.”

Dev stalks into my space, inching closer and closer in those same guarded steps.

“You’re ignoring us—”

“I ignore you all the time,” I say, trying to keep my voice light. Normal. Not in need of a cousin-shaped intervention.

“Two weeks is my thermometer,” Dev says, and he’s very close now. Barely a foot out of reach.

“Your what!”

“It’s how I know if you’re throwing a normal hissy fit or if it’s a Chosen One Emergency.”

“You really have to stop naming things after him,” I say, stepping back, trying to avoid the inevitability of Dev’s good intentions.

“No, I don’t think I will.” And then Dev is on me, wrapping me in a hug I didn’t want and desperately needed. I go limp in his stupid brawny arms and try to pretend that he’s the worst thing in the world.

“Release me?” I say, after the hug pushes into three second territory.

“You know you like it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The bulking heathen I call a cousin flops onto my sofa and looks up at me expectantly. “Come on, Baz. Sit down and tell me what he’s done.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” I say with as much formality as I can muster while sitting down next to him. “Get your feet off my coffee table.”

“Nope.”

“I hate you,” I groan, and Dev seems to find this hilarious.

“Stop being dramatic and tell me what the fuck happened.”

Rage has built up in my chest. Anxiety has festered. Indecision is a weed that has found purchase. With Dev as my witness, I make the feelings into words.

“Well, it all went to shit after you punched him in the face, really,” I start.

“Sure, it did,” Dev says, but he’s listening and that’s really all the encouragement I need. Fucking family and their good intentions. 

The story spills out.

“Wait,” Dev says, finally, after the wound has been lanced. “So _he_ gave _you_ space.”

“Yes.”

“Told you he’d work on things.”

“Also correct.”

“Didn’t expect you to save him? To be the reason he got up in the morning?”

“Your ability to paraphrase is really astounding, Devereaux.”

“I hate when you call me that.”

“I know.”

“Baz,” Dev says, and he’s in his dangerous mode—all seriousness and certainty. “I think…fuck, I can’t believe I’m saying this—”

“—I really wish you weren’t,” I try, but Dev is talking and there’s really no stopping him.

“—but I think that Snow…is trying to be better.”

“Well, yes,” I say. “But it’s hard. I don’t…I don’t know if I can wait the years it’s probably going to take.”

“Years!” Dev shouts, and it’s a little shocking.

“Um, yes?” I say.

“Baz,” and Dev looks really serious now. “No one ever gets _all_ the way better. Not you, not me, not Snow.”

“Okay,” I say, because I don’t have any other words to spare.

“You just wait until you think you can live in the mess.”

“I—” have no idea how to respond to that.

“Do you want him?”

“Yes.” Might as well face this unexpected wisdom with honesty.

“Will you survive it?”

“I think so?” And it’s true. I do.

“Then I that it might be time for you to make a move.”

The silence stands at attention, not daring to take an inch.

“Are you being serious?” I finally ask, because this was not a conversation I’d expected to have and I’m on edge.

There’s an expression so sympathetic on Dev’s face, I can barely stand to look at him. “Niall made me wait. Wanted to be ‘sure,’” Dev puts little angry air quotes around the word, “before we went and ruined our friendship.”

“Smart man,” I say, but Dev’s shaking his head.

“I was always sure. He needed me to show him.”

“And you think this is Snow showing me?”

“In a way. I think it’s more him actually doing the work.”

“I don’t think he’s ever going to be completely better,” I say because it’s honest.

“Is it enough?” These small sentences are taking me apart.

_Yes._

“Yes.” I say it. Because I think it is.

“Then.” The breath Dev takes is giant and dramatic. “Goddammit, this is not the conversation I expected to have. But fuck! I think you need to go get him.”

**Baz**

I check my watch. It’s past one o’clock. The world has gone to bed.

Except for me.

The Jag is lying in wait behind me, my coat casting long shadows up the road.

I’m terrified. But I’ve got resolve in my spine, holding me straight as I stare up at the building.

There’s nothing for it.

_Baz (1:02 am): Simon, are you awake?_

The world is quiet, different. _Magick hour,_ I hear Snow whisper in my ear, hear my mother say with an upward lilt to her words.

The world has gone to bed. Except for me.

And maybe…except for him too.

A peacock kyaahs! into the silence and I’ve never been happier to hear the sound. The loveliest sound in the world.

**Simon (1:03 am): yeah. are you okay????**

This is it.

_You deserve more than what’s left when he’s done._

I do.

_I can’t fix him._

I can’t.

Maybe though, now, after a war and maniac, after the ghost of my mother, after a monster who was just a boy, after America and the Arrivals gate. After everything. Maybe we can do more than limit the damage.

_Baz (1:04 am): That really depends. Are you going to come down and let me in?_

My heart is in my throat and my hands are in my pockets and I can’t breathe. The shadows twist and turn under lazy looks from streetlight.

There’s no reply.

No text. No call. Nothing.

 _Fuck_. I’ve miscalculated. He’s not coming. He’s going to leave me standing here, again, with tears in my eyes and confessions on my tongue. All of it, left poetically unsaid. I’m going to murder my cousin. I’m going to peel back his tendons like a cheese string. I’m going to—

“Baz!”

The front door bursts open and it’s—

“Simon.”

Blue eyes pin me to the spot.

Bronze curls rustle in the wind.

He’s in nothing but a white shirt and his pants—freckled legs bare in the cold. Looking at me like he always has. Like he wants to punch me. Like he wants to kiss me. Like he wants to cover me up and hold me down and keep me safe.

_Be brave._

There’s nothing for it. I stride forward, tall and anxious and a man in love.

I take an inch and Simon is on me. Hands feel my arms, my chest, my face—and they’re the gentlest things. He’s touching me like I once touched him, in the back of a truck under the stars. Like I’m made of butterfly wings.

Those blue eyes are wide. Like they can swallow the moment whole, like they can hold this slice of time with sheer strength of will, like an entrance to another world—one where he wants me and I love him and we both know how to say it, how to show it, how to live it.

“Baz.” He’s looking at me like I’m the only thing in the universe worth having.

I’m scared to touch him.

Worried that this will break.

 _You get to have this,_ I tell myself. _You’re here and you get to have this._

I lift my hands (both hands) and run my fingers down his cheeks. There’s stubble and exhaustion. Those irises are jumping off the page.

“You’re so beautiful,” I breathe because I can and because it’s true.

“Me?”

“You.”

Everything is delicate, ready to puncture and vanish into the night. The moment is incandescent. Until something fierce rises within me and the softness explodes into desire that will not wait.

I lean in, feeling his chest firm against me, and kiss him. The details swirl, soft har under my hands, mouth warm against my lips, tongue wanting me, teeth needing me. Fucking hot, he’s so hot.

It tastes like sugar and smells like spruce trees. He’s moving into my space, urgent and desperate, a man who knows exactly what he wants.

 _Me_.

Simon’s pulling me closer—as if we could be closer—groaning into my open mouth, hands rough on my waist and then up my back. For the first time in three years, I feel like my feet are on solid ground.

“You’re here,” he says, but his voice fumbles out, because he won’t break the kiss. I get to taste his words and I could die like this.

“I’m here,” I say into his mouth.

“It’s one in the morning.” Simon’s lips are moving, pressing kisses up my chin, down my nose, following the arch of my eyes, into my hair.

“Seemed fitting.”

“You’re so dramatic.”

“Would you change it? Really?”

“No.” He finally pulls away, and Crowley, how did I forget what it was like to be the centre of Simon’s attention. “Never. Not a single thing.”

I shiver under his touch and it has nothing to do with the cold.

“C’mon, you’ll freeze.”

Simon is pulling me towards the entrance to his flat.

“Says the man parading the street in his pants,” I say, but the words melt under the heat of my affection for this impossible man.

“You love it.” And I do. The half-dimple near the edge of his lips. The freckles on his calves. The broad slope of his shoulders. All of it.

_I’m here and I get to have this._

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

**Simon**

Not texting him should have been a simple thing. So what if I didn’t get to tell Baz about the stupid plot points of my life? So what if I had to resist the urge to tap out every detail of every fucking day I didn’t get to spend with him?

Respect. It’s sexy. Right?

I was so sure that he was gone forever this time. And yet, here he is, sitting on the end of my bed, and I have no idea what I did to deserve this. Him. Baz. Bottom lip between his teeth, shy and stern.

There’s a hole in my shirt, under the armpit, and a bleach stain dolloped across the back. I wonder if he’ll notice, if he’ll change his mind. If…

“Simon?” His voice is uneven. Rough and nervous.

I swallow. I don’t know where to go from here. “Yeah?”

“Can I see them?” he whispers. His profile haunts the moonlight. Sometimes, it’s hard to look at him; the want is going to kill me.

“My wings?” I know the answer, but I’m scared.

“Yes.”

“You want…you wanna see?” I feel my swallow move down my throat, over my Adam’s apple. “Even if it’s monstrous?”

“You still really think that?” Sharp consonants, round vowels.

“No,” I say, and it’s true. “Not anymore.”

Baz is the only subject in which I have always been an expert. There’s fear in those grey eyes, but certainty too; he knows exactly what he wants and he’s asking for it.

“Take off your shirt.”

I do. Faded fabric falls to the floor. I can’t breathe.

“Turn over.”

My pillow crackles under my cheek and I bare my back.

There’s a sharp gasp, but not afraid. “Beautiful.” Reverent.

“Baz—” I don’t know what I’m going to say. A finger presses against my spine, hushing me gently.

“Shhh,” he says.

I feel him settle on my hips, try not to think about how close he is, heat pressed tight. Want uncurls, and I push into mattress. Trapped and hot. Vulnerable and safe.

“Touch me,” I gasp.

“Yes.”

Long fingers are feather light against my flesh—gentle, everywhere. Mapping the lines carved into my skin.

“Baz—”

“Shhh.”

Hungry fingers take me apart, softly. So soft. The ink and the pain, the scars and the tissue, the broken parts of me that are somehow—

“Whole,” I say, and don’t know where the word came from. It bursts out. One word, forged in the heat of rock bottom. _I’ve fucked up and everything felt broken, but all of those messy monster parts can still be,_ “Whole,” I say again.

Baz answers with his lips, and the aching want cracks my ribs open. Soft at first, like a promise. And then deep, open mouthed. Gasping over every inch of my skin. Tenderness making me tender.

“I love you,” I whisper, quiet. So quiet. 

“I know,” he says, and I’m not myself anymore. Just a writhing, wild emotion.

“I can’t fix you.”

“I don’t…” My words tremble, and I won’t try to stop them. “I’m not sure I need fixing.”

“No,” he says, with his words, with his mouth. “You don’t.”

Those lips follow the line my spine. I can’t breathe and it doesn’t matter because I am undone.

“That’s what my professor explained,” he finally says. “That it’s not changing out old parts of you for something shiny and new.”

Speech has dissolved and the rest of me has melted into the sheets. I think I whimper. I don’t know.

“I’m going to cast now. Simon, is that alright?”

I nod. Feel his thumb trace the line of my jaw.

“ ** _Love is the beauty of the soul._** ”

The heat of his magick overflows, wave after wave, covering me up, tucking me in.

“Shhh,” he says again, and I think I’m crying. But I don’t know. I don’t know. “I’ve got you.”

I’m made of a thousand threads and Baz has me undone. I can’t see, can’t think, but I can feel.

The ends of me wrapped around his long fingers. Cat’s cradle, but with the strings of my heart, with the loose ends of my soul.

“You’re made of magick Simon,” he says. “You always were.”

Everything is twisting and turning, breaking apart and reconnecting. Light filters through towering pine trees. The smell of green wood burning. Damp soil and the grass after it rains.

_That’s me._

“Whatever he did to you, you were always magick underneath.”

The taste of blood on my tongue. The limp flapping of a wing, flailing against the floor.

_That’s me, too._

The world is dancing, the moment laughter in a bottle. The dark spot and the lightening threads. Woven together by firemaker hands. 

“Hold on, love.”

Ink ripples under flesh, magick threading into skin. I can feel something pushing against muscle and self-loathing, tendons and bone. It’s reaching, my tattoos and my dragon parts, twisted together, the strands of my life tied into delicate little knots.

“Nearly there.”

The need to stretch, to reach out and burst and flex and fly.

“Yes.”

Red fibers surge forward, up and out, alive and mine, two dimensions driving into three. 

“There you are,” Baz says.

_Here I am._

April, 2021

**Baz**

The dance floor smells of sweat and stale beer. I can’t count the people—there’s too many—bodies hot and oppressive. The world is spinning, and I can taste cheap soda on my tongue. It’s all a bit dizzying, the world twisting like a top and I feel—

Alive. So alive.

Simon’s body is flush against mine, his lips hot and mouthing against my neck.

_I’m here and I get to have this._

I feel one of his hands move inside my shirt, palms skating over my skin. Every point of contact is electric. A laugh tears out of me, manic and joy overflowing. I can feel his want mingling with mine.

I close my eyes and lean into it, into everything, into him. Memories of the last time I danced with Simon flicker under my eyelids. Nick Cave, fairy lights in the courtyard, placing his hands on me. Snow fumbling in a suit and dancing like a numpty with two left feet. It had been awkward. It had been lovely.

The difference is in the details. In the confidence of the man moving behind me. As I feel his lips pressed hot against my ear, I can’t decide which memory I like more. Dancing with Simon will always feel like fighting in place. Like mutual surrender.

“Outside?” he asks. “I’m overheating.”

“Yes.” _Anywhere, Simon Snow. So long as it’s with you._

The half-moon hangs, lazy and dim behind a film of light pollution. Simon hurries up behind me, threading our fingers together—the gesture is so effortless, my breath catches. I’m still getting used to the idea of him wanting me back.

“I used to dream about dancing like that,” Simon says, not looking at me. “Dancing like that with you.”

The honesty hits like a fist. “Of course you did. I’m an exceptional dancer.”

Simon huffs a laugh and it catches in the damp air.

The city hums with the kind of energy of those hours when the rest of the world has gone to bed. I’m not sure where we’re going—not sure it matters. The pavement unfolds and I follow it. Catching my breath with the man I love.

“You look cold,” Simon says after a while, pulling us to a grudging halt. There’s no one around to share the silence.

I let my head fall onto his shoulder. “Mmm.” Contentment stops my tongue, freezes my sarcasm; in moments like this, I just can’t be bothered.

“Come ‘ere,” he says, not a question. Snow pulls, arms reaching around my waist, and I let myself be drawn in. Chest to chest. His skin smells sweet and brown.

His magick prickles, and I feel goosebumps ripple across my skin. “Shouldn’t do that. Someone might see,” I say, but there’s no bite to it.

Simon doesn’t say anything. Just presses a kiss to my cheek and let’s his wings unfurl. Red muscle surrounds everything, warps up my world in warmth and magick, and I press my face into the heat. 

“Everything is ledges with you,” I whisper, and breathe him in. Just breathe.

A thousand-foot drop, and there’s nothing for it.

“I love you,” I say, and then step off; this time, I know that we’ll fly.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on tumblr!  
> [amywaterwings](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/amywaterwings/)


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